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Why Do States Commission the Truth? Political Considerations in the Establishment of African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

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Abstract

Although the use of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) has grown considerably over the last 3 decades, there is still much that we do not know concerning the choice and the structuring of TRCs. While the literature has focused primarily on the effects of TRCs, we examine the domestic and the international factors influencing the choice of a commission in sub-Saharan Africa from 1974 to 2003 using pooled cross-sectional time series. We find that states which adopted a TRC prior to South Africa were generally repressive centralized regimes which used the truth commission as political cover. However, since South Africa’s TRC, democratizing states have been more likely to adopt a truth commission as a form of transitional justice.

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Notes

  1. A number of scholars argue, however, that South Africa’s TRC produced mixed results in terms of reconciliation, justice, and the rule of law (Adam and Adam 2000; Mamdani 2002; Gibson 2004, 2005).

  2. Sikkink and Walling (2005) find that states do not necessarily see these options as mutually exclusive and that domestic trials often accompany TRCs. This finding, however, is regionally concentrated as most African states which established a TRC did not also choose domestic trials.

  3. As seen in various case studies, the structure and the mandate of TRCs are quite diverse, and to our knowledge, there has been no cross-national research to assess the causes and the consequences of the variations.

  4. The SADA dataset contains 47 country cases (not including Eritrea). Because of a lack of data, we did not code for Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe, and Seychelles.

  5. Hayner (2001) defines a truth commission as a body which (1) focuses on the past, (2) investigates patterns of abuse over time, rather than a specific event, (3) is established for a limited time, and (4) is supported by the state.

  6. In the case of Uganda and Nigeria which held 2 TRCs, we code country years through the last TRC (1986 and 2001, respectively).

  7. Both of Uganda’s TRCs (1974 and 1986) were established prior to South Africa’s TRC while Nigeria’s commissions (1999 and 2001) were established after.

  8. We also coded for several other independent variables including ethnic fragmentation, election cycle for the executive and the legislative branches, regime type, and the percentage of Catholic and Muslim identifiers. Ultimately, we eliminated regime type from our analysis because we were unable to find a consistent coding for African states (most problematic was whether the regime was semipresidential or presidential). We also dropped the ethnic fragmentation, religious, and election cycle variables from our final models because they were insignificant in all our preliminary tests.

  9. The Polity IV dataset’s DURABLE variable defines a regime change as a 3-point adjustment in the POLITY score over a 3-year period or less or the end of a transition period defined by the lack of stable institutions.

  10. We had considered using the Polity IV dataset Polity2 variable as a measure of democracy. However, we agree with Brahm (2007) that the Freedom House ratings provide a broader measure of democracy.

  11. Unlike Dancy and Poe (2006) who code for peacekeeping including 2 years after the process concludes, we only code for years in which there is an actual deployment of peacekeepers. Dancy and Poe’s logic in continuing to code for 2 years after the conclusion of a peacekeeping operation is that there may be a lag time between the completion of the operation and the creation of the TRC. While this line of reasoning has its merits, the difficulty is establishing the baseline for the “peacekeeping effect”. There is no logical reason to suppose that 2 years is a better measure than 3 or 4, and therefore, we decided only to code for the years of actual deployment.

  12. Because the number of observations of TRC adoption is relatively few, we were concerned that the rarity of the event would lead to an underestimate of the event’s probability. King and Zeng (2001a, b) have shown that binary dependent variables in which observations of the event are substantial less than no events can cause severe estimation problems. Therefore, we reran the first model using the relogit program (available at: http://gking.harvard.edu/stats.shtml) and found virtually the same results indicating that our estimates are robust to rare events bias. We did not run the others tests using relogit as the number of event observations was much higher.

  13. The Sierra Leonean TRC is the only other African commission which has been well-researched. The reason for this is largely due to the international criminal tribunal which was established in the country (e.g., the Special Court for Sierra Leone). Kelsall (2005) provides a good description of this TRC.

  14. Gibson and his colleagues have written extensively on the experience of South Africa and utilized survey research to draw empirically based conclusions regarding the benefits of the TRC process. As examples of this research, see Gibson and Gouws (2003) and Gibson (2004, 2005).

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Correspondence to Steven D. Roper.

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Table 5 Sub-Saharan African states

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Roper, S.D., Barria, L.A. Why Do States Commission the Truth? Political Considerations in the Establishment of African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Hum Rights Rev 10, 373–391 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-009-0122-6

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