ABSTRACT
This chapter constructs an original conceptual framework to understand who gets to speak, and how traumatic memories of mass violence are constructed by legal processes and the actors engaged with them. It investigates the way legal witnesses remember mass atrocities at the international criminal tribunals, and the implications therein. Ricoeur users the term ‘manipulated memory’ in relation to institutionalised production of memory. For Ricoeur it is within ‘manipulated memory’ that ideology functions, justifying power ‘that the resources of manipulation provided by narrative are mobilised’. Foucault’s understanding of discourse carries with it distinct epistemological assumptions about the social and political world. Identifying the discursive conditions within the court documents and interview transcripts entails the analysis identifying the repeatability of statements. In a Foucauldian understanding of discourse, statements are ‘series of signs’, in which, certain subjects and objects are constituted whilst other ‘just as feasible’ subjects and objects are not.
