Transitional justice, commonly defined as the process of confronting the
legacies of past human rights abuses and atrocities, often does not
produce the kinds of results that are imagined. In multiethnic, divided
societies like Uganda, people who have not been directly affected by
harm, atrocity, and abuse go about their daily lives without ever
confronting what happened in the past. When victims and survivors raise
their voices to ask for help, or when plans are announced to address
that harm, it is this unaffected population that see such plans as
pointless. They complain about what they perceive as the needless time
and money that will be spent to fix something that they see as
unimportant and, ultimately, block any restorative processes.
Joanna R. 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.
