Publication

Healing justice: Decolonial feminist theory and praxis in post-conflict Guatemala

Walsh, Aisling
Citation
Abstract
This research project explores the theory and practice of healing justice in Guatemala, with a particular focus on women’s participation in post-conflict recovery processes. It is based on a collaborative case-study with the Centre for Training, Healing and Transpersonal Research – Q'anil. Founded in Guatemala in 2008, Q’anil has become a pioneering space for experiential research, learning and healing focused on the emotional, spiritual and embodied wounds of conflict and colonisation. This thesis explores the limits of legal approaches to post-conflict reconciliation processes and institutional responses to atrocities committed during Guatemala’s Internal Armed Conflict (1960-1996). I argue that such mechanisms, within a State resistant to accountability, have rarely served the needs of victims, nor a broader project of social transformation which can address the root causes of conflict. I situate Guatemala’s Internal Armed Conflict within a continuum of violence. The Indigenous concept of the body-territory (Cabnal 2012) is central to understanding the depth of harm which has occurred to the peoples and territories of Guatemala throughout 500 years of external and internal colonisation. The body territory, thus becomes a site for healing gendered and racial violence as well as recovering entangled relationships between bodies and territories. Through ethnographic research completed over 18 months, I explore how Q’anil’s embodied pedagogy, which incorporates feminist and decolonial theory with somatic practice and therapeutic body-work, allow participants to recognise, name and begin healing the wounds of the violence continuum. In connecting individual experiences of gendered and racial violence and discrimination to historical, social and political patterns of violence Q’anil creates the possibility for collective healing processes tied to the broader project of post-conflict transformation. From this experience, I advance a paradigm of healing justice which can account for the complexity of harms produced by the violence continuum. Affective communities, like Q’anil, built around collectivity, solidarity and a feminist ethic of care, can be means to achieve justice by and for women.
Funder
Publisher
NUI Galway
Publisher DOI
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Ireland
CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 IE