Interview with Interpeace USA Director Graeme Simpson

Graeme Simpson discusses transitional justice, peace-building efforts, and the changing nature of social movements amidst greater social media access and a global pandemic, among other topics.

Graeme Simpson, Director of Interpeace USA. Photo: Oskar Kullander.

By: Phillip Pang, Staff Member

Graeme Simpson is the Director of Interpeace USA and Lead Author for the Progress Study on Youth, Peace and Security mandated by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2250. Mr. Simpson founded the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) in post-Apartheid South Africa, where he served as executive director until 2005, and has also worked as both Director of Country Programs and Director of Thematic Programs at the International Center for Transitional Justice, overseeing work on transitional justice in over 20 countries worldwide. Mr. Simpson serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and, as an adjunct lecturer at Columbia Law School, teaches a seminar on transitional justice.

Phillip Pang interviewed Mr. Simpson to learn about his work with youth, peace and security, his career trajectory through transitional justice and peace-building efforts, and the changing nature of social movements amidst greater social media access and a global pandemic.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

After getting your start working on the transition in South Africa, what led you to go to the ICTJ, and how did your experience with that work inform your approach to and expectations of your work in other regions?

There was a component of this which was about opportunity and opportunism. There was an incredible, often undeserved, often highly romanticized view from the outside of the South African transition. This was a struggle for freedom and liberation from a pariah state that was globally known and recognized, and coincided at its early origins with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of this new era. And so in part there was a sort of global fascination about this case, and I was in the unique position of having cut my teeth politically as a student leader in the anti-apartheid movement before founding an organization concerned with violence, reconciliation, and dealing with the past. I was not one of the people marketing the South African experience as if it were relevant to everywhere else, but it was nonetheless a reference point for so many different places. It is not surprising that the International Center for Transitional Justice was co-founded by, among others, a couple of key South Africans who had been involved in the South African truth commission. And so the opportunity that presented itself at the ICTJ was a fairly easy way of moving from the esoteric focus of the local and the national — and increasingly the regional — to a global canvas, and the opportunity to do that really was just incredibly appealing.

I was also very mindful of founder’s syndrome — I mean, apart from just staying longer than the growth of the organization requires, that you get in the way of its evolution and growth. I was a young — well, not that young anymore — but young-ish white man leading an organization that needed to own the intention of an affirmative action objective. This had to be an organization that was led by black South Africans; we had to move it in that direction, and I was a very willing participant in that. It was a factor that said, for me, willingly I need to move on, and I need to create that legacy and that commitment. So to that extent there was a push factor, but there was a big pull factor which was about the opportunity to work on the global stage to test my esoteric knowledge against other contexts and, frankly, to discover the equally noble causes of justice that existed in so many places that I had always thought were so utterly distinctive to the South African context because it was home. I’ve just, you know, made the planet my home instead.

Staying on the topic of career transitions, at the beginning of your transitional justice seminar you mentioned an existential crisis you had that was associated with moving from the ICTJ to Interpeace. We tend to use transitional justice and peacebuilding interchangeably in conversation, but what does it look like to “switch” careers from one to other?

For me it did not look like I was switching careers, to be honest. And this is the irony: in founding the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation and working there for fifteen years, there was an organic integration of these issues as part of a sort of interdisciplinary approach to what we did. We had psychologists, sociologists, historians, lawyers, political scientists, and social workers under one roof, and there was a defiance of the boundaries of discipline in what we did because it was true to the lived experience of ordinary people. They did not segment their experiences as poor, or black, or Zulu, or Xhosa, or victims or working class — so we could not separate out those parts of this integrated identity. We had to deal with their concerns around education, their exposure to torture, their battles with police victimization, their lived experience of brutalization under Apartheid, their gender-based, differentiated lived experience. Every single day in our work, we navigated the slightly bipolar, institutional role of critical partner to the government: as a civil society organization, we were critics of governments where they stepped over the line, and we were partners in that we helped them to evolve policy approaches and drive change. And in the midst of all that, we were consequently always engaged in a creative tension in the work around rights and justice, constitutional entrenchments and those processes of change, and peacebuilding and reconciliation. We never segmented these things; it was a lived, integrated experience at the national level.

When I stepped into the international space, I suddenly discovered this bifurcation of these fields of endeavor that was also supported by donor discourses which, even when they talked about holistic programming, nonetheless funded human rights or development or governance or peace-building. Very seldom were there funding strategies that incentivized the integration of those things. And in the UN, the pillars of human rights, peace-building, and development were these separate pillars and silos in which this operated. So it was much more a discovery of the distance between lived experience and local practice, and the 10,000-foot policy discourse which was so segmented. It basically presented me with this dilemma because at the ICTJ, an organization that was very much in the human rights mold, I struggled all the time to get attention to the issues of reconciliation, of peace-building in fragile negotiated settlements and all of the conversations about that, and then when I was at Interpeace in the peace-building world there was the reciprocal problem.

And so the existentialism is in the fact that as an activist at the local level this was never a segmented worldview, and suddenly as I moved into this engagement at a higher altitude this sort of disciplinary divide became something that was much harder to navigate. And I have to say, you know, to some extent my class at Columbia is all acting out on that because it is designed deliberately around the messiness of thinking about the interface between those things, because that is where the lived experience is. That is where the practice is, and sometimes the donor discourse and the policy discourse just don’t get it, and the international organizations are much less good at it unless they are truly connected to local partners and local actors.

Turning to a more current context, as issues have come under more scrutiny in the United States around gender and sexual assault, around police brutality, and now in the last few years around the mistreatment of migrants, how have these national movements affected or translated into the work of international organizations and activists on a global scale?

There is no doubt in my mind that in the era of globalization — in particular social media and the ability of a young person with a smartphone in Somalia to have a greater window onto these processes playing out across the Atlantic — that now the more esoteric nature of what people wrestle with as local has changed. This has also come up in the issues of youth, peace, and security that I have spent a long time working on, where there is something very powerful in the recognition for young people in South Sudan or on the South Side of Chicago who suddenly discover that their conversations about guns are almost identical. I think that the power with which Black Lives Matter as a domestic initiative in the U.S. quickly became a global agenda item was partly about everyone's access to that devastating video of George Floyd's death. Suddenly the connection is made, and the universality of these issues gains a new, organic trajectory, and it is not necessarily because of the work of international organizations, but international organizations become obliged to respond.

There are, you know, exceptions to that — I think that the power of civil society organizations globally, and international society organizations that took advantage of their ability to see across different contexts, was absolutely critical in building a global women’s movement. You had a platform of an organized feminist women's movement globally that had gained traction because of the deliberate work of international organizations seeding it, feeding it, and investing in it over decades, such that when the MeToo movement hit you got traction across the globe very quickly, and there's no accident to that. So there is a slightly symbiotic relationship between the role of these international organizations and the drivers from below of these social movements. I don't think it is in one direction or the other, but I think you would make a mistake sometimes in weighing too heavily the influence of the international organizations with intergovernmental, multilateral, or civil society organizations — as opposed to the innovation, drive, resilience, and resourcefulness of local actors and local social movements that set an agenda on things that sometimes just catches fires through its resonance with similar issues elsewhere.

Staying on the topic of our current context, thinking about the pandemic and its destabilizing effects around the globe, are there tools that traditionally fall within the purview of transitional justice that you think could be helpful to understanding and responding to a crisis like this?

You know, what I think has been most striking as we have looked at the impact of COVID-19 is the way it has fed into, fed off of, and resonated with pre-existing patterns of fracture, exclusion, and marginalization. That is easy to see in some senses in the U.S.: we know the racial division of impact, and how this has differently impacted people of color, poor people, and people who are marginalized. This is just about how the virus feeds off existing fault lines. But I think it is much broader than that. For example, through the lens of my youth, peace, and security work, we took a look at how young people described systemic patterns of exclusion and marginalization. They talked about being politically excluded from the policy forums that affected their lives; they talked about how their experience of exclusion and marginalization is very gendered; they talked about the critical issues of economic exclusion and marginalization and joblessness; they talked about education issues and being excluded from the power to shape their education.

COVID shuts down the job market for young people and closes all their economic opportunities, closes the schools and leaves massive numbers of young people just unable to go to school, and it in turn reinforces the digital divide because suddenly we see who can and who cannot get access. It has gender dimensions that we see arising in violence against women. And young people speak voluminously about how they are seen as the object of the exercise because they are less affected by infection and carry a much bigger responsibility in the shutdowns. And where young people and social movements are seen as a threat, the COVID crisis sanctions the shutting down of civic spaces by repressive governments. This is a perfect opportunity to shut down all of these dimensions of young people's lives, and this is illustrative of what the pandemic does: it feeds into all of the pre-existing patterns of social exclusion, marginalization, fissure and repression. And that should change the way we think about the lived experience of injustice.

I am not sure that the consequence is a transitional justice response. I think the consequence is a social justice response and a recognition of what this means about social, political, and economic marginalization and exclusion. Something needs to change in our society so that the palliative response to COVID is not just a vaccine, it's not the medicine or the band-aid over the wound, it's about understanding the underlying, preexisting fractures that this has exposed. Our response to COVID cannot be merely survivalist; it must be transformative because it must address those root causes. And to the extent that transitional justice is one of those instruments which struggles with getting from addressing the symptoms of violation, exclusion, and conflict to addressing their underlying causes, it may be a useful vehicle, but not on its own. This is a broader social justice agenda.

As we wrap up, I would like to hear more about your work specifically with youth in transitional justice, especially the power of narrative that you have mentioned coming from youth movements and youth protest and dissent. Are there specific considerations that go toward protecting that kind of voice when it is coming from young people, and how do you make sure that they have a proper stake in the conversation, that they have a place at the table, when a lot of these larger negotiations are happening above their heads?

Well, it’s interesting, because I think what happened in the Youth, Peace, and Security movement is that young people adopted the mantra of the disability movement, which was this sort of “Nothing about us without us” discourse. And I think that is incredibly powerful when it comes to issues of how societies deal with the past, understanding young people as the transmitters of transgenerational trauma and the inheritors of it. A lot of transitional justice is all about young people. They are inevitably the foot soldiers of conflict, they are the lieutenants in drug wars, they are the fighters in the trenches; and yet they are almost always excluded from the peace processes of which transitional justice mechanisms are a key element. And so the most important issue here is a recognition of the fact that young people have such a vital stake in this and they need to be co-owners of this; and it is not just because they were in the conflict, but because the durability and legitimacy of peace processes demand their buy-in.

We cannot resolve this by simply thinking about how we can ensure that young people participate in truth commissions or that young people are the beneficiaries of reparation. Although that's important, we also have to ask and answer the question of how to ensure that young people co-own these processes because they are involved — not only as participants, but in the design and in the evaluation of success or failure of these institutional mechanisms. If you look at the transgenerational power, the residual effect, of conflict and the trauma associated with it, you must also recognize that young people are critical to the transgenerational transmission or otherwise of that. And so they are indispensable to prevention and to the value of transitional justice as being about not only addressing the legacy of past victimization, but also the prevention of future victimization and the risk of recurrence or transmutation of these conflicts. So in that respect I would say it is much more existential — that is, the role and importance of young people, and the ownership of young people over these processes — than just a remedial measure that they have to participate and have to be heard. 

Phillip Pang is a second-year student at Columbia Law School and a Staff member of the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. He graduated from Amherst College in 2017.