Kieran McEvoy travelled to the University of Glasgow on Thursday to attend the 2014 General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research.
He was the discussant for a panel entitled ‘The Construction of Victim-Perpetrator Identities in Transitional Justice’.
This session brought together early career researchers to explore how transitional justice accounts for the complexity of identities in political violence.
Professor McEvoy’s paper focused on the role of lawyers in the construction of victim / perpetrator identities in transitional justice. In particular he focused on the ways in which lawyers in transitional justice settings are sometimes guilty of instrumentalising victims as witnesses for their own larger professional goals, as well as acquiescing in the reproduction of victim hierarchies which suggest distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ victims.