In this paper we explore the ways in which victims have participated in unofficial transitional justice efforts involving non-state armed groups, drawing on data gathered from a series of memoirs authored by those impacted by the Northern Ireland conflict. We will consider two ways in which victims can participate in what we argue to be ‘quiet’ transitional justice efforts (Dempster 2019), beyond formal or paradigmatic mechanisms. First, we will examine the stories told within these memoirs about the ways in which victims have unofficially engaged with non-state armed groups in the pursuit of acknowledgement, truth, justice and apology. Second, we will consider how these memoirs themselves are a vehicle for participation in transitional justice, as spaces where victims have taken the lead in narrating their own experience in the way that they wish. We argue that memoirs both are, and contain, evidence of victim-led transitional justice that takes place outside of, or in spite of, traditional or formal mechanisms. As such they can disrupt state- or elite-led transitional justice efforts, and bring to the fore narratives and experiences that may be overlooked in the processes of selection that are symptomatic of formal mechanisms such as truth commissions and trials.
Dempster et al. (Fri,) studied this question.