“What does 'repairing' means? Justice and reparation for victims of violence in Latin America today”

ZENOBI, DIEGO

París

Conferencia; Séminaire «Catastrophes et risques»; 2022

CERI-Sciences Politiques/LIER-EHESS

My broad argument in this talk is that when we try to answer what it means to make reparations, we have to consider what it means to do justice. Expectations of justice traverse both victims and the experts who are engaged in their struggles. So, regarding this shared idea between victims and lawyers, I suggest that in order to understand how they people relate to reparation devices, two distinct and closely related issues need to be considered. On the one hand, ways of understanding harm, and on the other, how that harm should be repaired. So people mobilise ideas about what is to be repaired, which are related to ideas about how it should be repaired. Regarding the juridical field, the existence of ideas related to "compensation" and "reparation" at the same time, shows that there are "small professional battles" about what should be repaired and how it should be done. In the legal space, notions about harm and how to repair it can be confined, contained, within legal categories. Lawyers engaged in the "big battles" promoted by victims (regarding Human rights, for example) articulate those big battles with those small battles: inspired by their commitments to support victims they endeavour to transform and broaden traditional legal categories. The direction devices take can be related to political causes, in which the expectations of justice that underpin the legal practices of committed lawyers are expressed. Such professional practices moves between already legitimized usages and novel attempts to enlarge and reorient classifications. Thus, certain legal concepts and categories are adapted, contested, resignified and manipulated in concrete circumstances. These manipulations show that just as devices make people, people make devices. These jurists and lawyers contribute to the progressive broadening of understandings of harm and reparation. The emergence in the legal field of new ways of understanding harm is partly related to this interdependence between "small" struggles in the professional fields and "big" political struggles. Those innovations make it possible to observe the evolution and transformations of forms of reparation over time. These forms are not necessarily successive, but "classical" forms and more "modern" forms, as the actors of law call them, can coexist.