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.

中文翻译：

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猫捉老鼠的游戏：冲突后漫画中的真相与和解政治

一些学者担心，在冲突后社会中普遍促进过渡司法的体制机制可能会疏远受影响的人群。从业者希望通过开发“外展”计划来弥合这一差距，在某些情况下，委托漫画书将他们的发现传达给他们寻求服务的人。在这篇文章中，我们探讨了冲突后漫画如何产生关于真相、和解以及和平可能性的意义，特别关注 2005 年作为塞拉利昂真相与和解委员会报告的一部分出版的连环漫画。 1991-2002 年内战的起因和罪行。该报告针对塞拉利昂青少年，讲述了“塞拉拉特”的故事，一个和平的老鼠国度，其田园诗般的生活方式因猫的入侵而中断。尽管该报告显示出与 Art Spiegelman 的惊人的形式相似之处鼠（一个文本也以自己的方式密切关注和解），它这样做是为了非常不同的目的。本文将这两个文本进行对话，以探索真理与和解的美学政治，并询问像漫画这样的流行视觉媒体在他们的实践和（重新）概念化中可以发挥什么作用。