News

Transitional Justice Graduate Symposium 2025

On April 14/2025, graduate students in the TJ program presented their thesis and dissertation research in the first annual Transitional Justice Graduate Symposium.

The papers presented included:

Maria Laura Flores Barba (Hispanic Studies)
“Looking Back Together: Community Crowdsourcing of a Photographic Archive for Memory and Justice in El Salvador”

Luis Miguel Herrera Bejines (Hispanic Studies)
"Biopolitics, Necropolitics and Migration in the Novelistic Production of Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo"

Hanna Protasova (Languages and Cultures: Comparative Literature)
"From Individual Trauma to Collective Memory: Babyn Yar Commemoration in Soviet Kyiv, 1941-1966"

Fatima Abdallah (English and Writing Studies)
Political Detention, Memorialization, and Identity: A Case for Literature as Transitional Justice

Julia Wainwright, (Political Science & Transitional Justice)
"Cultivating Resistance: Multigenerational Farming in Palestine"

Priscila Barros (Sociology)
"United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples' Language and Symbolic Power"

Michael Campbell (Law)
"Canada's Obligation to "Search the Landfill": Locating the Right to Memorialization in International Law"

Jeremy (Wei Chieh) Tsai (Sociology; pictured)
"Post-Fukushima triple disaster justice? Examining injustice claims in English language Japanese news articles between 2011 and 2021"

Dr Valerie Oosterveld (Acting Director; Law), Dr Samar El-Masri (Graduate Course Supervisor), and Dr Scott Schaffer (Graduate Chair) chaired the sessions.

PhD Student Jacob Evoy on Transitional Justice, Queerness and Intergenerational Trauma

Transitional Justice PhD student Jacob Evoy, who uses they/them pronouns, successfully defended their doctoral dissertation in June 2024 and plans to share their work during Queer Research Day this fall, an annual event at Western showcasing graduate student research through presentations, academic posters and one-day programming across campus.

Evoy studied in the department of gender, sexuality and women’s studies in Western’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities [and was part of the TJ Collaborative Graduate Specialization]. They focus on the study of transitional justice – a response to human rights violations that seeks to recognize victims – in post-conflict resolution and intergenerational trauma and queerness.

Evoy developed an oral history of a marginalized group, interviewing 16 queer children of Holocaust survivors and gathering information on their life experiences as members of both Jewish and queer communities.

Full story can be found on Western News.

Conducting Research in Ukraine During War

Prof. Marta Dyczok, of Western University's Departments of History and Political Science, presented a TJ Speaker Series talk titled 'Conducting Research in Ukraine During War' on September 19, 2023. Prof. Dyczok spent the month of August 2023 researching in Ukraine. She spoke about her experiences in Ukraine and how those experiences have impacted her research. A recording of the talk is available here.

Featured in the Western Alumni Magazine

Ukraine: One Year After Russia’s Escalated War

On February 27, 2023, the Centre held an online conference, Ukraine: One Year After Russia’s Escalated War. The first panel, chaired by Prof. Marta Dyczok, focused on information warfare, with speakers Yevhen Fedchenko, Journalism School, University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy; Andriy Kulykov, Hromadske Radio, Ukraine; and Roman Horbyk, Södertörn University College, Sweden. 

The second panel, International Criminal Law and Russia's War on Ukraine, was chaired by Prof. Valerie Oosterveld, with speakers Kateryna Busol, National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy (on investigating conflict-related sexual violence); Wayne Jordash, Global Rights Compliance Law Firm and Foundation (on crime investigations in Ukraine); and Jennifer Trahan, New York University Center for Global Affairs (on the proposal for a tribunal on aggression). 

The conference was sponsored by the Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction; Western Law's Public and Private International Law Research Group; Faculty of Social Science; Department of History; and the Department of Political Science.

TJ Centre faculty member Prof. Kate Korycki has published a new book, Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory and Jews, Poles and Communists in Twenty-First Century Poland, with Berghahn Books as part of its Worlds of Memory series. Weaponizing the Past explains why and how political elites in post-regime transition spaces narrate the past for political gain and what effects are produced by their preoccupation with collective remembering. First presenting a new theory of politicized memory and then telling the story of post-transition Poland, in which many different political actors narrate communism as evil and connected with Jewishness, Weaponizing the Past shows how democracy, progressive ideals, and notions of national belonging are narrowed and constricted. By exploring the contours of present-day anti-communism the book traces the operation of contemporary antisemitism, as well as its most recent implication with right-wing populism.

TJ Centre Acting Director Prof. Valerie Oosterveld has published a co-edited volume (with Indira Rosenthal and Susana SáCouto) titled Gender and International Criminal Law with Oxford University Press. The last few decades have seen remarkable developments in international criminal justice, especially in relation to the pursuit of individuals responsible for sexual violence and other gender-based crimes. Historically ignored, justified, or minimized, this category of crimes now has a heightened profile in the international political and judicial arena. Despite this, gender is poorly understood, and blind spots, biases, and stereotypes prevail.

Gender and International Criminal Law brings together leading feminist international criminal and humanitarian law academics and practitioners to examine the place of gender in international criminal law (ICL). It identifies and analyses past and current narrow understandings of gender, before considering how a limited conceptualization affects accountability efforts. The authors consider how best to implement a more nuanced understanding of gender in the practice of international criminal law by identifying possible responses, including embedding a sophisticated gender strategy into the practice of ICL, the gender-sensitive application of international human rights and humanitarian law, and encouraging a gender-competent approach to judging in ICL. The authors' aim is to strengthen efforts for accountability for all atrocity crimes-war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression.