In the future, technology will be used to document and record the implementation of various transitional justice processes, including reparations, vetting (like de-Baathification efforts), truth-and-reconciliation commissions, and even trials, making each of them more accessible and transparent. There are good and bad aspects to this shift. The televised trial of Saddam Hussein was cathartic for many Iraqis, but it also gave the late dictator and his supporters a stage on which to perform. Then again, as Nigel Snoad, a former senior U.N. aid worker now at Google, predicted, “Human-rights and justice groups can build a system for people to create memorials and to tell the story of those killed and who disappeared in the conflict.” Using these testimonials and memorials, he said, groups could “bring together stories from both sides, and despite conflicting accounts and occasional online flame wars (character bashing over the Internet through discussion lists and comments), create a space for apologies, truth-telling and an emerging reconciliation.”
The slow, painful mechanics of reconciliation will not be eliminated by Internet technology, nor should they be. Public admissions of guilt, sentencing and punishment, and gestures of forgiveness, are all cathartic for a society recovering from conflict. Today’s models for criminal prosecution at the international level—for crimes against humanity—are slow, bureaucratic and prone to corruption. Dozens of criminals sit in the International Criminal Court (ICC)—more casually referred to as The Hague—for many months before their trials even start. In today’s post-conflict environments, local court systems and indigenous local bodies are frequently preferred over the international institutions that lag behind.
The spread of technology is likely to exacerbate this trend. The sheer volume of digital evidence of crimes and violence will raise expectations that justice must be done, yet the glacial pace displayed by international judicial bodies like the ICC will limit how quickly such bodies adapt to these changes. For example, the ICC is unlikely to ever accept unverified videos captured on a mobile phone as evidence in its highly procedural trials (although organizations like Witness are trying to challenge this), but local judicial systems, with fewer legal constraints and a more flexible attitude, might be more open to developments in digital watermarking that will allow firsthand videos to be effectively authenticated. People will increasingly show their preference for these judicial avenues.
A local setting means that adjudicators, whether they are formal judges, tribal chiefs or community leaders, must have an intimate and expansive knowledge of the society—internal dynamics, main actors, major villains and all the nuances that international or distant bodies struggle to understand. When presented with digital evidence, the need for verification is lower, because the people and places are already familiar. In a postcrisis setting, there is also a distinct pressure from the community to mete out justice quickly. Whether these courts would be more or less fair than their international counterparts is a matter of debate, but they’ll surely move faster.
This trend could be manifested in future truth-and-reconciliation committees, or in temporary judicial structures after a major conflict. After the Rwandan genocide, the country’s new government rejected the South African truth-and-reconciliation model, arguing that reconciliation would take place only when the guilty were punished. But the formal judicial system took too long to process alleged genocidaires; more than a hundred thousand Rwandans sat in jail for several years waiting for their time in court. So a new system of local courts was built, taking inspiration from a grassroots, community-based conflict-resolution process known as “gacaca.” Under gacaca tribunals, the accused were confronted by the community and offered a commuted sentence if they confessed their crimes, shed light on what happened or identified the remains of those they killed. Despite being based in village justice, the gacaca tribunal system was a complex structure, involving different phases for judgment. The first phase was referred to as the cell level; in it the accused were brought before a tribunal of people in the community where the crime was committed. This tribunal determined the severity of the crime—whether the accused should be tried at the sector, district or province level, all three of which deal with appeals. The gacaca system was far from perfect. It came with the full panoply of traditional cultural prejudices, including the exclusion of women as judges and a failure to prosecute crimes committed against women with the same ferocity as those against men. These caveats aside, justice was fast, and the participating community generally felt satisfied with the process. Subsequent postcrisis governments elsewhere in the world have looked at adopting this model given how effective it was at advancing numerous reconciliation goals.
Whether citizens in the future choose to take their digital evidence to The Hague or to local judicial bodies, they will certainly have more opportunities to participate in the transitional justice-and-reconciliation process. They can instantly upload documents, photos and other evidence from a conflict or a former repressive regime to an international cloud-based data bank that will categorize and add the information to the relevant open files, to be used later by courts, journalists and others. Participatory memorials and inclusive feedback loops that allow populations to express their grievances in an organized manner—perhaps communities will use algorithmic argument mapping to aggregate the most prescriptive feedback—will help retain the confidence of groups that, once a conflict is over, might begin to feel neglected. Citizens will be able to watch the justice process unfold in real time, with live-streaming trials of major figures halfway across the world available on their phones, and a wealth of information about each stage of the process at their fingertips. Documenting the crimes (both physical and virtual) of a fallen regime serves a broader purpose beyond prosecution: Once every dirty secret of the former state is published online, no future government will be able to do quite the same things. Political observers always worry about a post-conflict state’s slide back into autocracy and watch keenly for signs of such a return; the full exposure of the former regime’s wrongdoings—how exactly it brutalized dissidents, how it spied on citizens’ online activities, how it hid money out of the country—will help forestall such possibilities.
Among all of the topics we’ve covered, the future of reconstruction is perhaps where the greatest share of optimism belongs. Little can be more devastating to a country and a population than natural disaster or war, or both, and yet we see a clear trend of postcrisis transitions occurring in shorter time periods with more satisfactory results. Unlike many avenues in geopolitics, the world does learn from each reconstruction example what works, what doesn’t and what can be improved upon. Clever applications of communications technology and widespread connectivity will accelerate rebuilding, inform and empower the people, and help forge a better, stronger and more resilient society. All it takes is a bit of creativity, plenty of bandwidth and the will to innovate.
1 These difficulties were compounded by the fact that the United States set up operational headquarters in Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, which had been turned into electronically shielded bunkers by the paranoid dictator.
2 We take these duties from a list of the ten functions of the state in the book Fixing Failed States, by Clare Lockhart and Ashraf Ghani, the founders of the Institute for State Effectiveness.