Maša Mrovlje – Judging violent resistances: Camus, Fanon and the grey zone of rebellion

In this week’s meeting of the Political Theory Research Group, we discussed a draft on “Judging violent resistances: Camus, Fanon and the grey zone of rebellion” by our group member Maša Mrovlje. In this paper, Maša sets out to discuss two things: first, she criticises current transitional justice scholarship for failing to attend to the complexities of violent resistance that cannot be understood in terms of victim-perpetrator dichotomies. In order to make sense of this ‘grey zone’, she introduces the reader to the ‘artistic inside’ the works of Albert Camus can offer. In contrast to Frantz Fanon for whom violence is needed — and justified — to counter the violent system of colonialism, Maša argues, Camus emphasises that this violence is necessarily an “involvement in the very injustice that needs to be overthrown” (9). In a second step, and with this perspective in mind, the paper turns back to questions of transitional justice by looking at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Through the analysis of three artistic examples — the novels David’s Story (Zoe Wicomb) and The Innocents (Tatamkhulu Afrika) as well as the film Homecoming (Norman Make) –, various problems of the judgment of violent resistance regarding the Apartheid regime are pointed out.

The paper and the lively discussion of its themes left us with various questions: What role can transitional justice institutions such as the TRC play in the process of judging and coming to terms with past violence? How can works of art help and support this process? And, lastly, how can we resist violent systems without playing by the same rules?

Written by Jill Poeggel

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Masa Mrovjle is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, affiliated with the Greyzone research project.