The project explored the ‘grey zones’ of complicity and resistance under complex circumstances of systemic violence. It focused, first, on the roles of collaborators, bystanders and beneficiaries, whose varied forms of participation in injustice have eluded the theory and practice of transitional justice, given the predominance of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy as an analytical lens. Second, it looked into forms of impure resistance – resistance marked by cowardice, betrayal, complicity, ambivalence – that are obscured by the masculinist, voluntarist, absolutist mythologies of heroism that usually dominate many communities’ memoryscapes. We sought to enrich the toolkit of scholars and practitioners by exploring the potential role of literary and cinematic representations of the grey zone of both complicity and resistance in opening up prematurely closed accounts. To this end, we focused on four cases: right-wing authoritarianism plus military occupation in Vichy France, apartheid in South Africa, authoritarian communism in Romania and military dictatorship in Argentina.
The project is eminently interdisciplinary. Working at the frontiers of political science, philosophy, history, law, literature and cinema, we achieved our guiding objectives. Conceptually, we accounted for the many faces on the spectrum of involvement with violence by illuminating the complexities of agency and responsibility against the background of structural injustice. Normatively, we exposed the troubling political implications of the failure to engage with the grey zones of complicity and resistance. Empirically, we analysed how artistic representations problematized complicity and resistance in ways that subverted reductive narratives about shameful and painful histories.
Our research into the three outlined objectives yielded significant results, while also opening new avenues of inquiry. Relying on a multitude of theoretical frameworks, the team members developed a historically attuned and temporally dynamic account of complicity and resistance, acknowledging how individuals’ choices are conditioned, constrained and enabled by their social position within broader structures and relationships of power. We exposed the limits of grand narratives of reconciliation, outlining how their omission of the grey zones of complicity and resistance risks reproducing systemic patterns of violence. We argued for the need to care for a plural space of historical meaning-making, where uncomfortable truths can be voiced and where existing political settlements can be scrutinised. We then examined the role artists could play in caring for this space of meaning-making. Aware of the risk of romanticising art’s political role, we adopted a sociologically and historically informed view of the artworld and distinguished between illuminating and obscuring representations of the grey zone. In conversation with literatures in the philosophy of art, aesthetics and film studies we also considered the specific formal devices and mechanisms through which consumers of artworks could become reflectively attuned and emotionally responsive to more complex visions of the morally and politically thorny pasts. To give concreteness to our theoretical contributions, we then discussed in depth several films and novels from our four case studies.
We disseminated these findings through our website, social media, scholarly publications, international conferences participation, outreach activities, including three thematic film series.
