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ID:
168866
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| Summary/Abstract |
Several scholars have raised concerns that the institutional mechanisms through which transitional justice is commonly promoted in post-conflict societies can alienate affected populations. Practitioners have looked to bridge this gap by developing ‘outreach’ programmes, in some instances commissioning comic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation, and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 1991–2002 Civil War. Aimed at Sierra Leonean teenagers, the Report tells the story of ‘Sierrarat’, a peaceful nation of rats whose idyllic lifestyle is disrupted by an invasion of cats. Although the Report displays striking formal similarities with Art Spiegelman's Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation, in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order to explore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media like comics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation.
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| 2 |
ID:
147612
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| Summary/Abstract |
Front-line loan officers of microfinance institutions (MFIs) are important in acquiring information on potential borrowers and selecting them in accordance with the MFI's mission. We use a unique data set on loan officers and their loan portfolios from China's largest NGO microfinance institution to test whether officers' personal characteristics affect the size and quality of their loans. We study a period in which the institution shifted from reliance on government donations and subsidies to commercial sources of funding. Imposing more commercial incentives on loan officers could affect how they balance potentially competing objectives to serve the poor and pursue profitability. We find that loan officers who were formerly farmers or worked in local government were better able to maintain lending to poorer borrowers, without incurring substantially lower repayment rates on their loans. In short, it appears that the career backgrounds of loan officers did play a role in preventing mission drift.
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