A truth commission goes abroad: Liberian transitional justice in New York

In 2007, Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) took its work to the Liberian diaspora in the United States. Judging by levels of public participation, the campaign was poorly received. This article tells two parallel stories. The first recounts the pressures that compelled the TRC to go to the United States. The second is an account of conflict in a Liberian community in New York. The article's denouement is the moment the two stories meet: the arrival of the TRC in New York and the Liberian community's response to it. The article's goals are twofold. In documenting a diaspora community's ambivalence to the work of its TRC, I offer a critique of the genre of transitional justice bequeathed to the world by South Africa's TRC and inherited by Liberia, one in which a promiscuous collection of vaguely defined ideas relating to truth, healing, and reconciliation is deployed to conceal pragmatic compromise. Second, I capture a distinctive feature of life in exile: the constitution of a theatre of power that mimics the trajectory of political life back home, and yet uses issues germane to the host country as matters of controversy.