What Can Geospatial Analysis Contribute to Transitional Justice?

We are excited to share the publication of "Mapping Truth: What Can Geospatial Analysis Contribute to Transitional Justice?" coauthored by IJL alums Alyson Reynolds and Chabeli Yumang and Dr. Zvobgo in Conflict Management and Peace Science.

Dr. Zvobgo published her first two books this year: the first on how transitional justice is governed globally and the second on advances in the empirical study of human rights. Now, with Alyson Reynolds ‘24 and Chabeli Yumang ‘25 (and building on past work with Alexandra Byrne ‘23 and Bilen Zerie ‘22), she brings these threads together, employing GIS mapping tools to understand memorialization of historical political violence in the empirical context of a post-colonial state. Abstract below. Check it out: https://doi.org/10.1177/07388942261441492!

This article studies an important transitional justice case, Mauritius, where a novel truth commission was established to address colonial violence and its legacies. In its recommendations, the commission outlined a slate of projects to commemorate victims and educate the public. Leveraging geographic information systems tools, we map atrocity sites, memory sites, and population centers, and find that contrary to the commission's recommendations, memory projects have been relegated to a few atrocity sites far from most Mauritians, rendering memorialization less effective. Our work contributes to quantitative and mixed-method approaches to studying transitional justice and nascent efforts to more systematically study memorialization.

Thanks to Nathan Liu and Zoha Siddiqui for research assistance and collaboration!