Mapping truth: What can geospatial analysis contribute to transitional justice?

This article studies an important transitional justice case, Mauritius, where a novel truth commission was established to address colonial violence and its legacies. In its recommendations, the commission outlined a slate of projects to commemorate victims and educate the public. Leveraging geographic information systems tools, we map atrocity sites, memory sites, and population centers, and find that contrary to the commission's recommendations, memory projects have been relegated to a few atrocity sites far from most Mauritians, rendering memorialization less effective. Our work contributes to quantitative and mixed-method approaches to studying transitional justice and nascent efforts to more systematically study memorialization.