By Danushka S. Medawatte, GCDC Doctoral Candidate, Kent Law School
As I commenced thinking of penning what I have experienced so far as a doctoral candidate at the Kent Law School, I realised that I view my contemporary lived realities as falling into two ends of a spectrum. While on one end I encounter delights, trials await at the other. Both have produced opportunities for me to transition from what I was a year before into a more perceptive individual. Here I succinctly explore my delights and trials.
My work focuses on ‘transitional justice’ (TJ). Reductively defined, TJ consists of a range of processes used in addressing widespread past harms that are committed during armed conflicts or during repressive regimes. I was first exposed to TJ as an academic and activist from Sri Lanka. My experiences at the grassroots levels as an activist working with a range of conflict affected women (such as victims of sexual and gender-based violence, internally displaced persons, women with disabilities, ex-combatants, ‘military widows’, and families of the disappeared) began to tug at the uneasiness that there is a significant gap in TJ. This relates to the chasms between TJ’s theoretical strands which I explore as an academic, and its practical tenets that I engage with as an activist.
My issue was how TJ, when dealing with situations such as that of Sri Lanka, focuses on the predominant cause of conflict which often relates to ethnic or communal divides. Gendered dynamics of conflicts and how they impact the very potentialities of TJ therefore are pushed to a secondary space. My proposal to work on this issue using socio-legal methods won the Global Challenges Doctoral Scholarship allowing me to work at Kent Law School under the supervision of Dr Rose Parfitt and Dr Suhraiya Jivraj. Receiving the scholarship and the opportunity to work with such intellectually stimulating, humanely sustaining supervisors has been my fundamental delight.
My trials, though are mostly personal than academic, also speak to a core issue that I am concerned with in my work – that is the fact of being a woman, and being a woman from a particular background of the sometimes derogatively referred to ‘Global South’. The main challenge I faced in the UK relates to the judgmental housing market which is at best disinterested in or at worst hostile against single mothers with brown skin who wish to rent a property. Racist attacks I faced in Canterbury that rendered me suddenly homeless with a four-year old daughter, and us being compelled to relocate to a space away from the university’s locality have undoubtedly taken a toll on my work and life. Nonetheless, at the end of this storm, I have been able to think of it as an experience that validates the lens with which I examine my research question – postcolonial feminism.
There is a delight here in adopting this lens as it not only helps me unpack the contextual realities of Sri Lanka but also allows me to connect my work with the chosen sustainable development goals (SDGs) in a more nuanced way. Gender equality embedded in SDG 5 and SDG 16’s focus on peace, justice, and strong institutions are core perspectives on which I build my work. It is only befitting that therefore these should become primary factors that affect my life in practise. Using postcolonial feminism and these SDGS, I wish to explore the potential applicability of my findings to contexts similar to that of Sri Lanka. This is to see how and whether TJ becomes negatively affected when women’s issues (particularly those rendered vulnerable by society) are deprioritised in the face of what is considered as predominant concerns such as ethnic cleavages that exist in transitional contexts.
As is common to any doctoral study, my work has already gone through several phases of reconceptualisations. The need to do so could both be a delight and be a trial. While I expect to experience this in further abundance in time to come, I am facing an added challenge as my home country is currently navigating through the worst economic crisis it has experienced. This has also fanned the flames of a socio-political crisis that destabilises my country further. Not only has this halted the TJ process but it has also added other nuances into communal relations, gender dynamics, the future of governance, structures of legal processes, articulations of justice, and the very nature of our individual and communal lives. While the instability has posed hindrances that I would otherwise not have factored in when planning my field research, I am disenchantedly eager to see how my project unfolds with the latest nuances colouring TJ’s functionality in Sri Lanka. Taking cognizance of both delights and trials, I say my eagerness stems from a place of disenchantment, as my country and its people suffer in their exploration of what justice should mean in transitional contexts. In multiple ways therefore, my project is a hard nut to crack. Yet, this is its very delight and trial.
Danushka S. Medawatte