At the Intersection of Restorative Justice, Gender, and Art

Last February, Annabel Martín gave the keynote address for the release of the 2030 Agenda for Gender Equality in the Basque Country at the Basque Institute for Women.

The autonomous coastal region, located in the western Pyrenees mountains in Spain, has its own unique language known as Euskara and maintains strong cultural traditions honed over thousands of years. The president of Basque Country attended the event, along with several cabinet members and dignitaries.

"I had never been invited to speak to politicians before," says Martín, a professor of Spanish, comparative literature, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. "I wasn't sure how to do that, and if my words would have an echo at all. It was important because I learned that academics do have a place in the real world. There is knowledge there that can be translated into policy, or help inform policy."

Martín has a long history of working to bring about change in the region. In 1975, when she was a young teen, her family emigrated from New Jersey, where she'd grown up, to the Basque Country. The move proved to be seismic for Martín.

"My adolescence coincided with the political reawakening of the country," she explains.

Dictator Francisco Franco ruled Spain with an authoritarian grip, sparking violent political protests and terrorism across the Basque region perpetrated by the group known as Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA. Political and trade union movements were often accompanied by car bombings and assassinations.

"It was very important as a young adult to be politically active, to be in favor of democracy and political freedoms, gender issues. But it was also very traumatic," Martín says. "I still have nightmares of things that happened during that time."

Growing up in this environment shaped Martín's life trajectory, inspiring her to craft a unique academic career intricately tied to the real-world challenges of reconciliation and restorative justice. She has co-edited two books on the topic, Transatlantic Letters: An Epistolary Exchange between Basque and U.S. Students on Violence and Community (2022) and Tras las huellas del terrorismo en Euskadi: Justicia restaurativa, convivencia y reconciliación (2019).

"My upbringing was where the seed started—thinking about the Basque Country, violence, reconciliation, and the atrocities that happened on both sides, and thinking about victims and what victims need," she says. 

Bringing gender into the conversation

A pillar of Martín's work is her focus on the role of gender in reconciliation and restorative justice. "Gender is one more issue in dialogue with these others, such as race and class inequality," she says. "It's all of these intersectional strands that have to be balanced to understand the complexity of what's going on. Society is a very complex thing and you need a good toolbox."

For example, she says, when ETA members would take up arms in the name of "defending their country from Spain," they would have a specific idea of "what it means to be male, what it means to be a soldier, what it means to be a good citizen, what it means to be brave."

As a result, one's sense of self becomes entwined with dehumanizing actions. "In order to place a gun to someone's head and kill that person, you have to 'other' that person: You have to make that person's humanity disappear," Martín explains. "That's not only a violation of the other; it's a violation of yourself, too."

Her keynote address at the Basque Institute for Women focused on this issue, suggesting that to achieve reconciliation, "a re-evaluation of one's identity—in the case of the terrorist, of masculine heroic identity—needs to happen, and one's own vulnerability needs to come to the forefront." Only then can the concept of forgiveness serve as "a new space that allows both victim and victimizer to see each other in a different light, in more complex ways, in more humanizing ways," she says.

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Annabel Martín delivers a keynote address at the Basque Institute for Women.

Martín works to elevate the experiences and voices of women in these conversations, and to increase awareness of gender-based violence. She serves as a founding director of the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth, and in November she served as a guest lecturer on gender and restorative justice for a class in communication studies at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain.

The role of art

Martín also explores how the arts—from photography and film to installations and exhibitions—aid processes of reconciliation. Her newest book project, Rest in Peace: The Basque Political Contours of the Arts, represents a collaboration with Basque artists Bernardo Atxaga, Julia Otxoa, Ricardo Ugarte, Luisa Etxenike, and Helena Taberna, among others.

Martín notes this book project has, during the course of her research, spawned numerous other initiatives. In 2022, she organized the symposium Unspeakable Truths: Political Violence, Gender, and Reconciliation in the Balkans and Spain (Basque Country). The event brought together individuals from both the Balkans and Basque Country who work on gender-based violence and reconciliation and highlighted the ways in which art can facilitate these processes.

For example, during the symposium an NGO group from the Balkans discussed the influence of an installation they had organized to address the many women survivors of sexual violence during the war in the region in the 1990s.

"These women were stigmatized by their families or by society at large because they were rape victims," Martín explains. "An NGO went around the country and asked for donations of skirts or dresses from family members of the rape victims. Then they hung them up; they made huge clothes lines in the soccer stadium in the capital of Kosovo. They wanted to make that horror visible but dignified."

The conference also included a screening of the feature film Maixabel, based on the story of Maixabel Lasa, whose husband—a Basque politician—was murdered by ETA terrorists. Lasa eventually met with two of her husband's killers and became an activist for reconciliation. She participated in a Q&A session with the audience after the film.

"It was very powerful. Everyone was very moved by the film," Martín says.

The conference led to Martín guest editing a special issue of the International Journal of Iberian Studies. Published last February, the special issue, titled "Unspeakable Truths," focused on the aftermath and recovery from Basque ETA armed conflict from 1959 to 2011 through the lens of affect, restorative justice, memory, peace-making efforts, and the arts.

Last summer, Martín began working with another victim of violence—a young woman whose brother was assassinated by Spanish police in the 1980s. Pilar Zabala Artano visited the area where her brother had first been tortured and is "working very hard to turn that place of torture into a place of memory—into a memorial site," Martín explains. "I'm trying to put together this woman's story for an upcoming article, to talk about all the work that she's done and to make this known a little bit more."

On the anniversary of Zabala's brother's kidnapping, in October, Martín participated in an interview with Zabala and her Spanish department colleague—and spouse—Txetxu Aguado on the Spanish radio program "La Ventana de la Memoria" (The Window of Memory). Zabala also asked Martín to speak on a panel this July about the generational effects of political violence at the Universidad del País Vasco, San Sebastián, Spain.

"The effects of violence usually last four generations," says Martín, underscoring the importance of programs in restorative justice and reconciliation.

"In the Basque Country, understanding how some victims of violence did not turn themselves to violence and look for vengeance is key," she says. "They very easily could have gone to a place of death and horror as well. Why didn't they go there, how didn't they, and what made them turn away?"