British Council’s New Voices in Cultural Relations prize 2025 has been awarded to Zoha Siddiqui, Queens University Belfast, for her dissertation on motherhood-based advocacy for transitional justice, that explores the Northern Ireland experience. She writes,
“The image of the weeping mother also features on protest banners used by mothers of the disappeared in Sri Lanka (Tamil Guardian, 2020). Mothers engaged in justice advocacy must strike a careful and strategic balance of politics and emotion. Emotions underly much of bereaved women’s advocacy, and they can draw attention and support from the public and political elites. But emotions can also be used to overshadow the political content of women’s advocacy by reducing their experience of maternal harm to a ‘natural’ maternal reaction rather than a collective political response to a strategy of terror.
Another emblematic aesthetic choice of mothers engaged in transitional justice advocacy is the use of the headscarf, a decidedly and unmistakably feminine article of clothing, often donned by older, religious women. Headscarves have become a shorthand for Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and can be seen throughout the country––worn by protestors, spraypainted onto walls and sidewalks, tattooed on arms, constructed as art pieces in public plazas. In El Salvador, too, headscarves feature in the Co-Madres’ campaign, and among the Mothers of Srebrenica in Bosnia, many of whom are Muslim and wear the scarf during religious prayer and commemoration (Srebrenica Heroines, 2022). By donning the headscarf, women can embrace their maternal and religious dentity in their advocacy while also drawing transnational connections to bereaved mothers for justice in other contexts.”