Asking the Right Questions

During the summer of 2014, I completed an internship in Tunisia with the International Center for Transitional Justice. I was halfway through my senior year as an Ada Comstock Scholar and anxious to finally embark into a future a long time in development: human rights work in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region). In 2006, I traveled throughout the Middle East and finally started to define my passion more deeply. I came to understand that one couldn’t care about human rights while ignoring politics and the environment. Much less can one espouse such a conviction and yet never have taken the opportunity to listen to the people most directly affected.  All of my naive beliefs were shattered in Palestinian refugee camps, slums in Cairo, and a clinic for asylum seekers in Istanbul. These experiences inspired me to educate myself by enrolling in community college, transferring to Smith, and applying to graduate school.

My studies had always focused on anthropology, politics, and human rights in the MENA region. So, when political change began sweeping the region, I could be found glued to Al Jazeera’s live stream and jumping wildly on my bed as nations flooded their streets and dictators fled their countries. Within two years Tunisia had democratically elected a multi-party government and ratified a new constitution.  I first traveled to Tunisia during that process, in January 2014, to participate in a two-week “crash course” political conference.  While there, I began to make plans to return in the summer using my Praxis funding.

The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) is a New York-based NGO that works with populations who have experienced dramatic political change, whether physically or structurally violent.  In Tunisia, ICTJ works with the government as well as civil society organizations to create systems to investigate Tunisia’s history of human rights abuses, ensure accountability, and create a reparations program. ICTJ will do this via a 15-member Truth and Dignity Commission that was created through the passing of the Transitional Justice Law. Before traveling to Tunisia, I didn’t understand any of this; I didn’t know what transitional justice was; and I had never heard of the ICTJ.

Tunisian Jasmine Revolution
Jubilant demonstrators on steps of Municipal Theatre, Avenue Bourguiba, Central Tunis. January 20, 2011. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

To prepare for my internship, I read everything I could find on transitional justice.  But of course, as we all learn one way or another, what we read in books usually doesn’t adequately prepare us for life outside the classroom.  As soon as I arrived, I was asked to dive right into my project: to dissect the Transitional Justice Law and identify points that needed clarification for foreign researchers and journalists. After identifying 27 questions, I went to work writing answers to each one.  In many ways this was the perfect project for me.  Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that my favorite activity, and probably the source of my activism, is asking questions.  My project was a straightforward Frequently Asked Questions document, no “why” or “what if” questions.

I had the opportunity to see how an organization such as the ICTJ functions during periods of major change like Tunisia’s democratic transition. I walked away cautiously optimistic. I deeply appreciate the work the ICTJ does and was inspired by the staff I met, both from the Tunis office and from around the world.  That said, I also boarded my flight with “why” and “what if” questions swirling in my head that were critical to the process and foreign involvement in it. Two of the most important lessons I learned “in the field” were how to ask critical questions in the most constructive ways and that as American, especially as a young one, just how overwhelmingly important it is to listen and show restraint. While writing my senior seminar paper, I came across the phrase “obscuring local particularities.” My position in life makes it easy for me to think I know how to vote or how to be a feminist or how to protest injustice. I like to think that I was never unconscious of this privilege, but I am now even more aware of how often I must reexamine my motives and opinions. Tunisia taught me that “local particularities” are what make social change effective. That I can ask “why” and “what if” all I want, but unless I can dislodge myself as much as possible from my point of origin, I won’t be of any support to people who are far more passionate, knowledgeable, and desperate about their own fight than I could ever be. I don’t need to speak for them; their voices demanded that their dictator “GO,” and he did. I don’t need to teach them how to organize; their protests overwhelmed the capital and forced a dictator to flee. I don’t need to give them a lesson on agency or victimhood; they know what they have endured. That is why they stood up to a dictator. Who am I, who are any of us, who call ourselves activists, to assume that we could have any more at stake than those we are trying to help?

When I went to Tunisia, I knew this.  I didn’t have an emotional “I see the light” moment.  What did happen is that I came home with the ability to turn my “why” and “what if” questions on myself in deeper ways than I could before.  I learned how to better engage the “local particularities” of communities I work in, and to question myself constantly.

Pekol profile pic_4Jennifer is an Ada Comstock Scholar from Seattle, Washington. She is most at home when she is living out of her suitcase. Her next adventure is attending graduate school at SOAS in London.

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