Burundi’s decades long conflict has been dotted with no less than four separate international investigative missions, with the latest publishing its findings only recently. Yet the expanding use of International Commissions of Inquiry (ICOIs) in Africa as elsewhere in the post-Cold War era has to date been unmatched with close academic scrutiny. In particular, there is little scholarly literature studying the political anatomy and the impact of ICOIs on the very conflicts they come to investigate, suggesting these instruments are somehow insulated from the dynamics that surround them. The paper scrutinizes the politics of fact-finding and the nature of the resulting ‘revelation.’ How does international fact-finding interact with local dynamics of ongoing conflict? How are investigative reports (re)appropriated and recycled back into local action?
The paper specifically focuses on two ways in which international investigative reports have historically become peculiar participants to local conflict dynamics in Burundi. First, by qualifying violence and conflict in particular ways, I show that ICOIs can generate symbolic capital unequally benefiting the different sides to the conflict, and as such they participate in constructing hierarchies of blame and victimhood. Second, through the simultaneity of exposure (‘finding out’) and lack of official recognition, ICOIs can contribute to broader dynamics of impunity and public secrecy, risking to produce partial, socially disengaged, and politically disempowered forms of revelation. The study urges us to construct investigative instruments that are better equipped to account for and address some of these effects.