Forensic Scientists in Transitional Justice: Knowledge Production and Recovering the Disappeared

The disappearance of persons during periods of conflict or dictatorship is a global, and increasing, phenomenon. Central to efforts to locate, exhume, and identify the remains of the disappeared are forensic scientists. Despite the central role played by forensic experts in recovering the disappeared across Latin America and in many other contexts, the relationship between forensic scientists and transitional justice remains under-explored. In this paper we will present preliminary findings from a project that examines one facet of this relationship: knowledge production, drawing on semi-structured interviews with experts in the field. The specialist knowledge that forensic experts have has led to their playing a central role in efforts to recover the disappeared. In turn they contribute to producing knowledge about, for instance, the location and identity of the disappeared, or the manner of their death. The outcomes of forensic work might be presented as evidence in trials, can contribute to the information gathered by truth commissions, facilitate broader memorialization efforts, as well as acknowledgement, restoration and reparation, contributing to what society knows about the disappeared (Kovras 2023). Consequently, the outcomes of forensic work can shape legal, social and political understandings of past violence alongside contributing to satisfying victims’ needs and rights. While there may be an assumption that forensic science provides for an objective, factual “truth”, this overlooks the social, political, cultural, and emotional dynamics of transitional justice contexts (Olarte-Sierra 2022). This project interrogates this intersection, exploring the knowledge produced by forensic scientists, how this knowledge is produced, and the potential barriers or challenges that forensic scientists can encounter. This paper seeks to make a tripartite contribution. First, transitional justice generally focuses on elite and grassroots actors, overlooking the 'mid-level' actors who interact with transitional justice institutions and practitioners, victims, perpetrators and the wider public, to implement and deliver transitional justice (Collins 2018). Forensic scientists are one of these actors. Second, an emerging scholarship has critiqued the dynamics of knowledge production in transitional justice as a field as being neocolonial (e.g. An-Na'im 2013; Matsunaga 2016; Park 2020). This paper explores a manifestation of knowledge production that complicates the dominant pattern in the field of developing ideas and approaches in the Global North and imposing these on the Global South. Third, this paper sheds further light on the vital work of experts involved in efforts to recover the disappeared and increase knowledge about past mass violence in the context of transitional justice.