Doctoral Dissertation Research: Transitional Justice and State Intervention in Kinship

The relationship between governments and families has long been complex. There is significant variation across contexts in the extent to which and in what ways states govern what constitutes a family and the limits imposed on family activities. This doctoral dissertation research project leverages transitional justice as a way of querying how families respond to changes in governmental policies regulating their structures and functions. It complements research that attempts to understand why governments regulate kinship by focusing instead on how families respond to governmental interventions and policies. Specifically, this research contributes to social scientific theories that relate kinship to the state by focusing on the survivor families’ experiences of transitional justice procedures. In addition to supporting the training of a graduate student, the findings of this research are disseminated broadly to academic, non-academic, and stakeholder audiences. Transitional justice offers an opportunity to understand how state adjudication of past familial grievances impacts family relationships and activities. In this context, this doctoral dissertation research poses the following questions: 1) How do transitional justice courts decide which families' grievances are merited and what evidence do they muster to support decisions? 2) How are family relationships and activities affected by government decisions regarding claims of familial grievances? To answer these questions, the investigators conduct a multi-sited ethnographic study involving semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and archival analysis. In so doing, this doctoral research contributes to social science studies on the relationships between states and families by providing more nuanced theory via interrogation of these relationships in contexts marked by violence. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.