World’s Disappearance Commissions: An Inhumanious Quest for Truth

Rethinking Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Introduction: Truth Commissions and Memory Practice 2 Conflict, Recovery, and Social Forgetting in Sierra Leone 3 Studying Truth Commissions Ethnographically 5 “Revealing is Healing”? 6 Memory Practices and Sierra Leone’s TRC 7 Forgiving and Forgetting 8 Accountability vs. Reintegration 11 Recommendations 12 ABOUT THE REPORT As the international community reflects on the tragedy in Rwanda ten y...

Bayes, Reproducibility and the Quest for Truth

We consider the use of default priors in the Bayes methodology for seeking information concerning the true value of a parameter. By default prior, we mean the mathematical prior as initiated by Bayes [Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 53 (1763) 370–418] and pursued by Laplace [Théorie Analytique des Probabilités (1812) Courcier], Jeffreys [Theory of Probability (1961) Clarendon Press], Bernardo [J. ...

Will Truth Out ? — An Advisor ’ s Quest To Appear Competent ∗

This paper deals with the problem of providing adequate incentives to an advisor who might be tempted to conceal his true opinion because of his desire to appear competent. We show that if a competent advisor never makes mistakes, the incentive problem will disappear if the time horizon is long enough. If a competent advisor makes infrequent mistakes, the incentive problem will disappear for in...

Truth Commissions in Post-Communism: The Overlooked Solution?

Despite their increased popularity in Latin America, Africa and Asia, truth commissions have remained an overlooked solution to coming to terms with the recent human rights abuses perpetrated in communist Europe. Since the start of the democratization process in the early 1990s, only Germany, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Romania have employed truth commissions as meth...

Science and Religion in Quest of Truth