Monitor on Psychology - July/August 2012

A truth seeker in Africa

As a child of international aid workers, Gabriel Twose, PhD, grew up amid conflict. As a baby, he lived through the 1983 coup in

Steve Hay

Burkina Faso. As a boy, he moved with his family to Nepal just as the

Maoist revolution began. Growing up, Twose also took several trips to see his mother’s family in Guyana, where conflict still simmers between people of Indian and African descent.

In 2007, he spent a summer with his parents in Johannesburg, South

Africa. There, he learned about the truth commission that had been convened to help heal the scars left by apartheid.

Truth commissions are court-like bodies that hear testimony from both the perpetrators and the victims of violence. Unlike courts, however, these commissions rarely have the power to prosecute offenders. Their goal is simply to record the facts surrounding a crime and, in many cases, to make recommendations regarding accountability, reparations or reconciliation. Twose was fascinated by the idea, and he found that there had been little psychological research on these commissions.

Twose has been working to fill that
research gap ever since. In 2010,
he spent nine months in Liberia, a
country that set up its own truth
commission in the wake of two
bloody civil wars. He conducted
dozens of interviews and hundreds
of surveys with Liberians and
found that most people saw major
problems with the country’s truth
and reconciliation commission, for
example, that it failed to uncover the
full extent of the wartime abuses.
What’s more, “the warlords who
came to testify generally expressed
little or no remorse,” Twose says.
He also found that people who had
been exposed to the commission’s
proceedings — for example, by

A recent graduate of Clark University in Worcester, Mass.,

attending the hearings or reading about them in the newspaper — were less willing to refrain from revenge than those who hadn’t been exposed. Twose hopes this work might help other nations avoid Liberia’s mistakes and implement the model more effectively — for example, by ensuring that truth commissions make practical recommendations and that the government implements them, something that did not happen in Liberia, he found. n

Join the International Day of Peace: Sept. 21.

At noon on Friday Sept. 21, people
around the world will ring a bell in honor
of International Day of Peace, asking
world leaders and their militaries to
cease fire for just one day.