Voices That Remake the World: Testimony, Restoration, and Social Transformation across Korea, Aceh, and Beyond

Confronting legacies of state violence and mass atrocity—across war, colonialism, the Cold War, and dictatorship—has rarely been settled by a single verdict or by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions alone. It has unfolded as a long social process, sustained over decades by the persistence of victim-survivors and their advocates. What has driven it is the emergence of victims and advocates as political subjects: those who gave testimony, who listened to and documented it, and who forged new legal reasoning that remade the social morality around them.

This session brings together interlocking cases—Japanese military sexual slavery, the Jeju 4.3 massacre, post-conflict Aceh in Indonesia, and Korea's TRC efforts—to examine how silence was transformed into voice, how commissions and transitional-justice bodies investigated and decided, and how social awareness of victims' subjectivity, war, colonialism, and justice took shape. These themes converge on one guiding question: what constitutes restoration? We ask how restoration and transformation are accomplished, how enduring trauma and the long temporality of recognition resist closure, and how civil society and the state can support such efforts. We treat transitional justice not as a finite settlement but as an ongoing, generative process authored by those who survived.

Above all, the session frames these as global questions, reading Korea alongside other sites of protracted reckoning to open a dialogue on how locally rooted struggles converge with global justice across different temporalities and geographies.