Click here to download interview in MP3 format. [middmedia pleroyantaki Commons-MIIS-web_data-middlebury-edu Jan Black Interview.mp3] This hour long Policy Pace program is an exceptional opportunity to delve into issues of justice and history with Jan Knippers Black, a professor at MIIS dedicated to improving human rights.  Professor Black describes issues, events, and dignitaries who are involved in Amnesty International, gives us her definition of transitional justice, and guides us through recent successes and challenges to human rights especially in Chile. Ms. Black and host Paula LeRoy share perspectives about the plight of the Mapuche people in Chile as experienced on the Global Majority sponsored J-term trip for MIIS students.  Making complexity simple, Jan suggests recent history can be understood by reading 1984, Brave New World and watching the movie Brazil. The interview continues with an in depth exploration of transitional justice, truth telling, reconciliation, conflict resolution, and the repercussions for society when perpetrators are not brought to justice. Ms. Black eloquently explains how periods of transition are periods of great hope and of great fear while highlighting issues about equity that invoke fear. In comparing South Africa’s process to Liberia’s to Sierra Leone to Chile’s, the intricacies of transitional justice are described that can make the difference between true transition and ineffective transitions. In her gentle yet direct way, Ms. Black indicates US culpability and lack of truth telling. US pressures to expand empire, the casual acceptance of failure, unworkable structures that lead the state of constant war, and unwillingness to probe the truth are laid open. Returning to the issues of Chile, a discussion of the empowerment of bullies that occurs during dictatorships such as Pinochet’s is enlightening. Presently, student protests and indigenous communities are met with bully tactics, militarism, and anti-terrorism legislation, which begs the question “Is democracy or dictatorship the “normal” state of affairs?” The interview concludes with a look at Jan’s career as a radical, her continuing work, and hopes for her students as they swim upstream.

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