As a professional historian, my work lies at the nexus of historiography and transitional justice with a specific focus on state-sanctioned historical commissions as mechanisms to address the legacies of the past.
I obtained my Ph.D. at the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University. In my doctoral research, I developed a theoretical and methodological framework for historical commissions operating in conflicted and divided societies. The findings will be published in the book Clarifying the Past: Understanding Historical Commissions in Conflicted and Divided Societies.
The core of the book is a database of 27 state-sponsored (socio-political) historical commissions that operated from the 1990s until the present. Through the analysis of these cases, which I divide into 4 categories (diplomatic, post-totalitarian, (post-)conflict, post-colonial), I develop a theoretical and mythological framework for such commissions building on the concepts of historical clarification, historical dialogue, and political reconciliation. Even though the book has its main focus on the operationality of historical commissions as well as the role of the sponsoring state in shaping the emerging historical interpretative frames (historical narratives); the epilogue opens the discussion into a potential avenue for the future of these commissions by exploring the synergy between historical commissions and the field of transitional justice.
As a postdoctoral research fellow at the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University, I will continue to develop my research on state-sanctioned historical commissions investigating what are the implications of framing historical commissions as instances of transitional justice in consolidated democracies. This project examines the unforeseen and unintended effects of framing historical commissions, like the Parliamentary Commission on Belgium’s colonial legacy, as transitional justice. As consolidated democracies are now de facto becoming the bulk of transitional justice interventions, this research is being undertaken at a crucial point in time. Taking into account that the relationship between transitional justice and historical commissions has not yet been explored, this research will provide a systematic approach that will be key for policy-makers, legislators, and practitioners at the time of designing new commissions aimed to foster more stable and inclusive societies.