Thin Sympathy: A Strategy to Thicken Transitional Justice

Chair: Professor Rachel Kerr, Professor of War and Society & Vice-Dean (Education) for the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy

Speaker: Dr Joanna R Quinn, Director of the Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction and a professor of Political Science at The University of Western Ontario

 

In helping deeply-divided societies come to terms with a troubled past, transitional justice often fails to produce the intended results. The thin sympathetic hypothesis suggests that the way forward is to take a step back: Taking the time to deliberately cultivate a basic understanding of the basic facts of the other’s suffering prior to establishing any transitional justice process, by guiding individuals from each of the different factions and groups in learning about how the other group has suffered and the implications of what they have gone through, can effectively prime the population to begin to engage in a transitional justice process. Fostering “thin sympathy” among different groups will effectively change the broader social ethos to allow the work of transitional justice to succeed, and can foster the development of a more durable transition. Thin Sympathy: A Strategy to Thicken Transitional Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) ISBN-13: 9780812253160

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Bio

Dr Joanna R Quinn is Director of the Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction and a professor of Political Science at The University of Western Ontario, where she is cross-appointed to the Faculty of Law and affiliate-appointed to the Department of Gender Sexuality and Women’s Studies. She is Past President of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Dr. Quinn’s research considers the role of acknowledgement in overcoming the effects of human rights abuses after conflict. She has written widely on the role of acknowledgment in truth commissions and in customary law in Uganda, Haiti, Canada, Fiji, Solomon Islands, and Canada. Her current project considers the importance of thin sympathetic engagement in post-conflict societies and how to flip the switch to make people care about what has taken place there through thicker engagement in reconstruction efforts. She holds a PhD from McMaster University, a Master’s from Acadia University, and a B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Waterloo.