Enemy Friends: Silence and the Limits of Transitional Justice at Melanesian Boarding Schools

Abstract

Transitional justice scholars and practitioners often suggest that silence about the violent past in public discourse indicates a denial of what happened during recent civil violence. Many therefore advocate a significant role for education in post-conflict transitional justice processes. Specifically, they encourage the writing and teaching of history, including explicit coverage of the prior violence, as an academic discipline. The idea is that history education can correct important misconceptions about the conflict and its origins and help students find comfort with opposing perspectives on the events. However, having conducted a multi-sited, ethnographic, and interpretivist research project at secondary boarding schools in Melanesia's two post-conflict settings (Bougainville and Solomon Islands) I find this view of silence and its remedy not only a poor fit with Melanesian approaches to reconciliation, but a narrow foundation from which to understand schooling as a mechanism of transitional justice.

I argue that Bougainvilleans and Solomon Islanders look back on their violent pasts through the prism of their relationships to others, and that schooling gives them ample scope to develop and practice that relationship to the past, even in the new connections they form with their colleagues and peers. I establish that their place-based forms of transitional justice, that is to say indigenous ideas about justice incorporating customary, foreign and even colonial influences, revolve around reconciliation processes that generally require individuals to refuse to discuss the violent past with others. Then I apply two concepts concentrated on the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life to the integrated boarding schools I studied. One is Michel de Certeau's notion of the everyday and the other, cultural production, comes from critical ethnographies of schooling. I explain how refusals to discuss the violent past helped the teachers and students form meaningful relationships across their differences, including the differences at issue during the two civil conflicts. However, because of their interactions in everyday life at school, the teachers and students also developed ideas about real culture in which they constructed a particular vision of their constituent cultures. This vision left them susceptible to the sorts of land and identity politics that led to the civil conflicts and to perceiving an unequal relationship between the village and town as part of their national identities. Thus in this thesis I suggest how an ex-militant in Solomon Islands, George Gray, could describe his former school mates as his enemy friends.

Given that place-based transitional justice can deny the stories of Bougainvillean and Solomon Islander women, I suggest that classical transitional justice theory may have some limited value for these women if it is responsive to their social lives. Overall, however, I question the utility of history taught as an academic discipline for post-colonial contexts like Bougainville and Solomon Islands. Instead, I suggest that if transitional justice scholars and practitioners understand formal education in the context of legacies of colonisation, then they might find scope to address those legacies, as well as the violent past, with locally meaningful versions of social studies education. Show more