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Cira Palli Aspero

Visiting Researcher

I am a senior researcher at the Human Rights Centre, Faculty of Law and Criminology, Ghent University, where I am the co-coordinator of RedressHub, an ERC-funded valorisation project that maps redress efforts for colonial harms across Belgium. As a trained historian specialising in contemporary political history, my work is at the nexus between historiography and […]
cira.palliaspero@ugent.be +32 456391952

Meet Cira Palli Aspero

I am a senior researcher at the Human Rights Centre, Faculty of Law and Criminology, Ghent University, where I am the co-coordinator of RedressHub, an ERC-funded valorisation project that maps redress efforts for colonial harms across Belgium.

As a trained historian specialising in contemporary political history, my work is at the nexus between historiography and transitional justice. I critically engage with public history and discourse formation, with a particular focus on state-sanctioned historical commissions as mechanisms for reckoning with the legacies of the past.

My doctoral research at the Transitional Justice Institute, Ulster University was foundational to the trajectory my work has since followed. Driven by a rather simple question: What are historical commissions, and how do they function? my study developed a theoretical and methodological framework to deepen our understanding of these bodies of inquiry. Through the analysis of the foundational documents of 27 commissions, I traced how they constructed historical knowledge within political mandates. This work offers a critical lens through which to assess the potential of historical commissions to carry out processes of historical clarification and shape public understandings of the past.

This foundational research also revealed a recurring pattern: the adoption of the language and logic of transitional justice by historical commissions. Building on this insight, my research as a postdoctoral fellow at Justice Visions at Ghent University, interrogated the implications of framing these bodies as mechanisms of transitional justice – particularly in the context of commissions tasked with addressing colonial legacies. I analysed the implications of framing them as transitional justice mechanisms and interrogating the coloniality embedded both in these bodies and in the field of transitional justice more broadly. By expanding the original database to include new cases, the initial dataset now contains over 40 commissions, offering a broader, empirically grounded understanding of how these bodies operate within shifting epistemic and political landscapes.

As I expanded this research, I also began to trace the wider landscape in which these commissions were situated. In doing so, I encountered the work of a broad range of societal actors – including grassroots movements, civil society organisations, local institutions, and communities – who are articulating diverse and often urgent demands for measures to confront the enduring impacts of colonialism. Their efforts form a dynamic and diverse field of redress initiatives, shaped by differing understandings of what redress entails. While this plurality is a strength, it also presents challenges around fragmentation and sustained collective action. These observations informed the idea of RedressHub: an interactive platform co-created with those actors involved in redress initiatives. RedressHub is being designed to map and connect redress initiatives across Belgium, with the aim of supporting knowledge sharing, design, and implementing redress initiatives.

Education

  • PhD – Transitional Justice Institute – Ulster University (2019
  • Ms.C University of Barcelona  (2015)
  • Bachelor’s Degree in History, University of Barcelona, Barcelona (2011)

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Contact Information
Visiting Address

Paddenhoek 5, 1st Floor, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

Postal Address

Ghent University, Campus Aula, Human Rights Centre, Universiteitstraat 4, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

Direct Contact

cira.palliaspero@ugent.be

+32 456391952

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Publications