Niké Wentholt is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Humanistics. There, she works in the Dialogics of Justice project, which focuses on how people seek recognition, reparation and justice. Our cases cover many different forms of historical and systemic injustice in and by Dutch institutions: colonial crimes in Indonesia; human rights violations in Nigeria by multinational Shell; historical institutional abuse in Dutch Catholic institutions; and political-military failure during the Srebrenica genocide. Meanwhile, despite all the differences in these cases, we see so many parallels and patterns that we are learning more and more about how systemic injustice works as well as the ways to make it visible and challenge it. Here we look both at civil litigation, and at other forms of transitional and transformative justice: such as monuments, apologies, compensation, art and institutional reform. Here, social relations are central: does recognition and justice contribute to more equal, fair social relations, preventing the original injustice from taking place as well as the reproduction of injustice in the process of recovery?
Niké is a historian and holds a Master’s degree in Russia and Eastern European Studies. For her PhD thesis, she researched political use and abuse of the violent past in the Western Balkans. In the Dialogics of Justice project, she is working on the Srebrenica case study, the overarching socio-legal analysis, and creating a toolkit to bring our findings back to practice.
