TJ Director Dr. Joanna Quinn’s New Book, Thin Sympathy
Dr. Joanna Quinn, Director of the TJ Centre, has published a new book, Thin Sympathy: A Strategy to Thicken Transitional Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press). Dr. Quinn spent twenty years working in Uganda and uses its particular case as a lens through which she examines the failure of deeply divided societies to acknowledge the past. She proposes that the needed remedy is the development of a very rudimentary understanding—what she calls “thin sympathy”—among individuals in each of the different factions and groups of the other’s suffering prior to establishing any transitional justice process.
Based on 440 extensive interviews with elites and other thought leaders in government, traditional institutions, faith groups, and NGOs, as well as with women and children throughout the country, Thin Sympathy argues that the acquisition of a basic understanding of what has taken place in the past will enable the development of a more durable transitional justice process.
The book flyer is available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
