Furthermore, the petitions held within the NRC [Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission] archive highlight the agency of Ghanaians within this process. Far from ideas about good governance being enforced on Ghana from abroad through the implementation of a truth commission, the petitions submitted to the NRC demonstrated that many Ghanaians had developed ideas of what constituted a good and bad citizen based on their own lived experiences. The NRC archive represents a vast and rich collection not just of Ghanaian experiences of human rights abuses in the postcolonial era, but of attempts to produce and reproduce a moral economy which counteracted those abuses. These petitions, when viewed as a genre, outlined a consistent and coherent perspective on what good and bad citizens do.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220094241263787
We forget at our peril that new policy narratives–in this case about citizenship–can be assembled from under-acknowledged policy genres–in this case petitions to truth commissions. So what? For one thing, such a petition becomes a very public practice to complexify citizenship.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 