An exploration of feminist issues and strategies in the field of transitional justice

Transitional justice ideas, processes, and institutions offer post-conflict and tormented societies the glimmer of hope of a more stable future erected upon values of the rule of law, accountability, justice, post-conflict reconstruction, and development. Societies wracked by violence see transitional justice as offering the tools to midwife a democratic, rule-of-law state. Broadly speaking, transitional justice can be said to be concerned with how societies address legacies of past human rights abuses, mass atrocity, or other forms of severe social trauma, including genocide or civil war, in order to build a more democratic, just, and peaceful future. Epistemically, the field of transitional justice is variegated, comprising theoretical debates, the comparative assessment of domestic accountability schemes, international criminal justice, the study of truth commissions, and ethical-legal debates concerning the morality of compromise on accountability for gross and systemic violations of human rights. Several subthemes to the discipline suggest the absence of complete coherence in its characterization and praxis. The focus of this article on transitional justice in Africa domesticates the exploration of the subject matter in the African experience. Transitional justice in the African context takes on a special character and orientation. While the core objective of transitional justice praxis in Africa remains similar to transitional justice orthodoxy in the international context—namely, the fight against impunity and the push for accountability and post-conflict reconstruction and development—the emerging consensus points to the effective realization of socioeconomic justice, gender justice, and the right to development as equally critical, if not central, to the redress of past injustices. Instrumental to the successful delivery of this broadened set of objectives is a combination of traditional and nontraditional frameworks embedded in a wide range of laws, policies, institutions, and community norms and customs. In combination, they present the rough contours of an African model and mechanism for not only dealing with the legacies of conflicts and violations of human rights, but also addressing governance deficits and developmental challenges in line with the African Union’s Agenda 2063. This article is structured around a number of themes aimed at deepening appreciation of the field of transitional justice in Africa, namely: Transitional Justice Laws, Policies, and Norms; Transitional Justice Accountability Systems; criminal accountability in Africa’s transitional justice praxis; Human Rights, Democracy, and Governance; Decolonization and Postcoloniality; Conflict and Transitional Justice; Transitional Justice Goals and Outcomes; Reimagining the Field of Transitional Justice; and journals publishing on transitional justice.

To date, only sparse attention has been afforded to the potential and realized intersections between transitional justice and cultural rights. Despite a range of advancements and interventions, cultural rights have long been a blind spot in the field of transitional justice, one that has yet to be thoroughly interrogated on either a theoretical or practical level. This is at odds with a demonstrated willingness to challenge transitional justice’s preoccupation with bodily integrity crimes, and civil and political rights violations more generally. This chapter attempts to interrogate this blind spot by analysing the engagement of cultural rights in both the discourse and practice and transitional justice. In the field’s constantly growing and evolving discourse, cultural rights are routinely omitted, backgrounded, or discussed without reference to State obligations under international human rights law. Cultural rights are likewise marginalized in transitional justice practice. This is especially the case with cultural rights violations, or cultural wrongs more generally, which are not confronted and redressed in the same manner as other human rights violations. At the same time, cultural rights are not wholly absent from transitional justice and, indeed, are increasingly being addressed, respected, accommodated, and studied in interesting and significant ways. Several relatively recent developments have helped to push cultural rights increasingly towards the centre of transitional justice thinking and practice. However, these constitute clear exceptions to transitional justice’s overall antipathy towards culture and stand in stark contrast to the field’s historical marginalization of cultural rights.

The transitional justice field has been, throughout its relatively short development phase, de facto exclusionary to the issues and concerns of women. This is not to say that the broad issues that have dominated the field have not influenced women’s lives (Bell, 2009a). Such core aspects of transitional justice’s domain as criminal accountability, restorative justice, reconciliation, amnesty, and lustration invariably affect women individually and as a group. Nor has the impact of transitional justice been uniformly negative. For example, greater emphasis on, and attention to, criminal accountability for systematic human rights violations has also addressed some of the harms experienced by women and is a positive development (Askin, 2009). There is increased recognition, however, that, in its broadest sense, the discourse and the practice of transitional justice has failed to take into account the unique needs and issues that women face in conflicted and repressive societies (Bell et al., 2004; 2007). Encouragingly, there has been a growing literature and practice that recognizes the gendered lacunae of transitional justice theory and practice, and identifies pragmatic and transformative routes forward.

Reviewed by: Knowledge for Peace: Transitional Justice and the Politics of Knowledge in Theory and Practice ed. by Briony Jones and Ulrike Lühe Claire Wright (bio) Knowledge for Peace: Transitional Justice and the Politics of Knowledge in Theory and Practice (Edward Elgar Press, Briony Jones & Ulrike Lühe eds., 2021). ISBN 978 1 78990 534 2 (ebook, Open Access), 288 pages. As a social scientist working within a broadly qualitative paradigm, I acknowledge that the politics of knowledge and my own positionality have shaped my work and experience. I have carried out in-country and on-line fieldwork in Latin America for the past fifteen years and, during this time, I have been faced with very real dilemmas of my relationship with the “field,” (or, in more human terms, the individuals and societies that I am studying). Such dilemmas include issues of negotiating consent, ownership of voice, and—crucially—the possible impacts of my research, not just on other scholars, but on real-life political processes and relationships. On top of this, I struggle with how to meaningfully overcome my own situation of privilege as a white, female scholar from the Global North and the exigencies of English-speaking academia, which are often incompatible with the dynamics and interests of the Global South. Indeed, knowledge production frequently reproduces colonial relationships and even the most well-intentioned ethics committees and concerns over “due diligence” may actually reproduce power dynamics between the North and the South. In this context, the edited volume Knowledge for Peace. Transitional Justice and the Politics of Knowledge in Theory and Practice1 offers an engaging and timely read for all scholars, who, like me, continue to grapple with these issues. Focusing on the field of Transitional Justice (TJ), and with broad reference to cases from the African continent, Briony Jones (University of Warwick, UK) and Ulrike Lühe (Swisspeace/University of Basel) bring together a truly diverse group of authors (from scholars to practitioners) to discuss the impact of how knowledge is produced—particularly power dynamics and insider/outsider status—on peace-building processes. The interface between theory and practice is the backbone of the book, which opens up a discussion on the high-stakes contexts of mass human rights violations. In recent years, there has been an emerging academic discussion on the (neo)colonial nature of TJ2 and a couple of noteworthy reflections on how scholars from the Global North might usefully carry out fieldwork in such contexts.3 However, few go as far in content or are as original in perspective [End Page 210] as Knowledge for Peace, for reasons I shall outline below. The volume opens with a very helpful introduction in which the two editors (Jones and Lühe) explain the rationale behind the book, namely that “[t]he field of transitional justice is characterized by substantial and difficult debates over what ‘better’ looks like, and we offer our contribution to these debates with this book on the politics of knowledge.”4 Having situated the volume in several debates within TJ scholarship and practice—including “knowledge imperialism”—they turn to discuss the two key themes that run through the chapters, namely: the interlinkages between the processes and politics of knowledge production; and the research-policy-practice nexus. The opening chapter also summarises the contributions of the different authors and explains the way in which the volume is organised: a first part, which offers a series of discussions on the politics of knowledge from a theoretical perspective; a second part, which explores the linkages between knowledge production and agenda-setting; and a third part which focuses on the profiles and expertise of knowledge producers. Rather than summarising the contents of the different chapters that together make up the three sections of the edited volume, here I would like to point to four particularly original and thought-provoking chapters and tease out their contributions for our understanding of the politics of knowledge and its implications for the field of Transitional Justice. The first is Chapter 4 “Producing knowledge on and for transitional justice: reflections on a collaborative research project,” co-authored by Briony Jones, Ulrike Lühe, Gilbert Fokou, Kuyang Harriet Logo, Leben...

The transitional justice field has shown great versatility in its response to the consequences of conflicts, dealing with human rights violations, addressing legacies of the past and tackling emerging issues and vulnerabilities. This editorial reflects on Africa’s three decades of implementing transitional justice with a focus on key lessons learnt and their contribution to the betterment of transitional justice offering on the continent. The editorial discusses an African transformative justice as codified in the African Union Transitional Justice Policy as responsive, resonant and contextually relevant to the lived realities on the continent. The editorial argues that the African Union Transitional Justice Policy is the embodiment of lessons learnt from transitional justice practice on the continent and demonstrates the adaptability and expansion of the frontiers of transitional justice to address emerging issues as well as both historical legacies and most recent violations.

This article examines the various points at which accountability for economic crimes, including large-scale corruption, intersects with accountability for human rights violations. To date, transitional justice has largely compartmentalized legacies of abuse into those based on a narrow set of human rights violations and those based on economic crimes, which the author argues is an inadequate way to address both sets of abuses. Because corruption and human rights violations are mutually reinforcing forms of abuse, the field of transitional justice should approach economic crimes in the same way it approaches civil and political rights violations. The author suggests that traditional transitional justice mechanisms would be strengthened by an engagement with corruption and economic crimes, which would allow for both sources of impunity to be confronted.

Within the brief history of the field of transitional justice, South African renderings of reconciliation both loom large and occupy an exceptional and somewhat unstable place. This chapter, critically examines this placement by considering, first (and all too partially), the history of reconciliation in South Africa and the place of the South African TRC within the recent history of truth commissions, and second, the ambivalent uptake of the language of reconciliation on the part of elite international actors within the field of transitional justice, with a particular view to the International Center of Transitional Justice, founded in the aftermath of the South African TRC and the world’s largest nongovernmental organization devoted specifically to the theory and practice of transitional justice.

Objectives: The importance of the study stems from the fact that the region with all its countries, including Iraq, was and still lacks political stability, whether due to internal factors or external influences, or the conciliation of workers, and since transitional justice is an important idea, and essential in managing the stages of change, a solid democratic state that concerns everyone and cares, Everyone participates, from here, and through the centrality of the issue of change and the importance of the issue of transitional justice in it, and through the fact that the transitional experience in Iraq is a practical experience that took place early in the region, and in a pluralistic society that reflects the previous regime in which there are many features, and common to most of the prevailing political systems in the region This makes the study of his experience in this topic and the problems he encountered a suitable case for a useful study with an impact on more than one level. The research paper aims to study the negative aspects of Iraq's experience in the field of transitional justice, and its transformation from a transitional justice case into a tool of factional and partisan revenge, whose procedures are marred by a lot of arbitrariness, which makes the topic useful for those who work to implement these programs in the future in order to avoid problems and mistakes . Methods : The study adopts an analytical, inductive approach that relies on uncovering facts by starting from the details, then proceeds gradually to laws, general rules, and the college, where the Iraqi experience, its details, and the internal and external influences that accompanied it will be examined, down to the features and features And the facts of this experience, especially the negative aspects of it that affected the state of stability and construction in it, and this is particularly evident by analyzing the trends, paths, and problematic of transitional justice interventions in the current political transformations in Iraq after 2003, because understanding the course of the struggle for power and the influence between the components It will help us understand the dimensions of the competition for power and influence between these political blocs that represented the Iraqi opposition during the days of the political system under the rule of the (Baath Party) before its fall in 2003. By perpetuating the phenomenon of competition and conflict between political blocs, including the perpetuation of two phenomena: The first is uncertainty about the possibility of renewed violence in the future. The second is the intense competition over how to institutionalize the balance of power in Iraq after 2003. Results: The failure of transitional justice in Iraq, and the failure to implement its real mechanisms that do not contradict human rights principles, was the reason for Iraq to reach its current stage, and the increase in impunity and injustice of persons who were not the cause of committing any human rights violations. The results indicate that the last feature is indeed important because the deep partisan motives linked mainly to sectarianism, ethnicity, nationalism, and to a lesser extent regionalism, are the main determinants of the competition between the Iraqi political blocs that took over the rule of Iraq after 2003. The reasonable explanation is that a sense of the narrow political and partisan gains of these Iraqi political blocs may compensate for the debts owed due to past violations and urge a preference for avoiding the pursuit of truth or punishment for fear that political gains may be threatened in some way. Conclusions : Failure to resort to fair legal accountability causes new human rights violations, so the following question can be raised: Does ignoring legal accountability increase the number of perpetrators of violations, and help some of the perpetrators in the previous regime to get away from punishment, and wrong others? And that the negative engagement in transitional justice file, ignoring legal mechanisms, and to obey the wishes of the party, and lead to factional influence in the political process and thus stumble in the democratic transition? Keywords : Democratic political Iraqi punishment transitional justice damage construction DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/13-6-03 Publication date: March 31 st 2021

The field of transitional justice has expanded rapidly since the term first emerged in the late 1990s. Its intellectual development has, however, tended to follow practice rather than drive it. Addressing this gap, Violence, Law and the Impossibility of Transitional Justice pursues a comprehensive theoretical inquiry into the foundation and evolution of transitional justice. Presenting a detailed deconstruction of the role of law in transition, the book explores the reasons for resistance to transitional justice. It explores the ways in which law itself is complicit in perpetuating conflict, and asks whether a narrow vision of transitional justice – underpinned by a strictly normative or doctrinal concept of law – can undermine the promise of justice. Drawing on case material, as well as on perspectives from a range of disciplines, including law, political science, anthropology and philosophy, this book will be of considerable interest to those concerned with the theory and practice of transitional justice.

Reproductive autonomy is a pivotal part of women’s access to equal citizenship, yet it has not been included in any international nor regional human rights treaty. In the past decades, the U.N. Committees, notably the CEDAW Committee, and regional human rights bodies, particularly the Inter-American System for the Protection of Human Rights, have timidly advanced reproductive justice through their jurisprudence, including through the use of reparations. Drawing from the standards of reparations developed in the field of transitional justice, human rights bodies increasingly rely on reparations to enhance the transformative effects of their decisions. These reparations intend to include a gender-perspective in their design and aim to ensure the non-repetition of human rights violation, not only to the victim, but to society. Constitutional courts in Latin America are increasingly relying on the standards of reparations in their own decisions, including in those on reproductive justice. In this Article, I analyze two recent rulings from Latin American constitutional courts–one from Colombia and one from Ecuador–to understand how courts can use reparations to advance reproductive justice. I analyze these particular rulings for two reasons: (1) Both rulings have the potential to develop reproductive jurisprudence in the region where high courts have traditionally imported international and comparative law to resolve legal debates over reproductive rights; and (2) Both rulings challenge the traditional concept of reparations and offer an opportunity to rethink how the remedy can be deployed in a human rights context.

Transitional justice—i.e., how societies respond to the legacies of massive and systematic human rights violations—has become an important scholarly field as well as a political and legal terrain of concern and contestation. The role of courts in the larger picture of transitional justice is particularly contentious and judicial behaviour in these contexts is under-explored. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it maps out some of the historical developments in the field of transitional justice since the Second World War, focusing specifically on courts. It shows that although the ‘toolbox’ of transitional justice has been vastly expanded over the last few decades to include a wide range of institutional and non-institutional measures, claims for criminal accountability continue to constitute one of the core pillars of transitional justice when the most atrocious human rights violations are being committed. Second, the chapter offers a tentative explanation for how and why claims for criminal justice for past wrongs rarely translate into successful trials, despite the general consensus that trials are considered vital to reestablishing the rule of law, and hence contribute to transitions to peace and democracy after violent conflict. Specifically, the chapter identifies some of the obstacles that constrain judges from keeping alleged human rights perpetrators to account.

The article examines the EU’s policy framework, programs and tools on support to transitional justice, and evaluates their impact and challenges. Transitional justice refers to the various ways of addressing the past human rights violations and serious crimes that occurred in contexts of political transition, such as post-conflict or post-authoritarian situations. The EU has adopted a comprehensive policy framework on support to transitional justice in 2015, which defines its principles, objectives, and modalities of engagement with partner countries and international and regional organisations on transitional justice issues. The EU has also used various instruments and actions to support transitional justice initiatives worldwide, such as providing financial assistance, engaging in political dialogue, offering technical expertise, and advocating for transitional justice norms and standards. The article also illustrates how the EU has supported transitional justice processes in different contexts and regions, such as dealing with the legacy of World War II, the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, the war in the former Yugoslavia, and the Arab Spring. The article concludes by identifying some of the achievements and shortcomings of the EU’s involvement in transitional justice processes, such as contributing to accountability, recognition, trust, reconciliation, and non-recurrence; but also facing inconsistency, selectivity, conditionality, interference, cooptation, politicisation, fragmentation, duplication, etc. The article also suggests some ways to improve the EU’s policy framework, programs and tools on support to transitional justice, such as enhancing consistency, coherence, coordination, complementarity, and adaptability. The article also explores how the EU’s role and approaches in the field of transitional justice can affect its own identity and credibility as a global actor that promotes human rights, democracy, and the rule of law as core values of its external action.

Sixty-six years after the Nuremburg trials, the practice and study of transitional justice is well established. To robustly engage with current debates in the field, this introduction to the edited collection 'Critical Perspectives in Transitional Justice', stresses disagreement rather than consensus. It explores the nature of divisions within the field of transitional justice and subjects these to close scrutiny. It lays out four principal concerns with current trends in transitional justice: the under-theorisation of the field; its disconnect from core academic disciplines; its tendency toward advocacy rather than analysis; and its emphasis on technical institutional responses without clear articulations of their objectives and discusses how the chapters included in this collection respond to these concerns.

This volume is an inter-disciplinary scholarly resource bringing together contributions from writers, experienced academics and practitioners working in fields such as human rights, humanitarian law, public policy, psychology, cultural and peace studies, and earth jurisprudence. This collection of essays presents the most up to date knowledge and status of the field of transitional justice, and also highlights the emerging debates in this area, which are often overseen and underdeveloped in the literature. The volume provides a wide coverage of the arguments relating to controversial issues emanating from different regions of the world. The book is divided into four parts which groups different aspects of the problems and issues facing transitional justice as a field, and its processes and mechanisms more specifically. Part I concentrates on the traditional means and methods of dealing with past gross abuses of power and political violence. In this section, the authors also expand and often challenge the ways that these processes and mechanisms are conceptualised and introduced. Part II provides a forum for the contributors to share their first hand experiences of how traditional and customary mechanisms of achieving justice can be effectively utilised. Part III includes a collection of essays which challenges existing transitional justice models and provides new lenses to examine the formal and traditional processes and mechanisms. It aims to expose insufficiencies and some of the inherent practical and jurisprudential problems facing the field. Finally, Part IV, looks to the future by examining what remedies can be available today for abuses of rights of the future generations and those who have no standing to claim their rights, such as the environment. Since the late 1980s massive political and legal transformations have taken place in Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and Southern Africa, which has challenged many of the presumptions of legal and political foundations of a nation-state including the questions of how to build a nation-state in divided societies or the role of law in democracy building in the face of such massive societal changes driven by a holistic mix of players. This process is by no means over as one can judge but the most current ‘Arab Spring’ or even the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ type of movements across the world, including in the developed states. Participators of these events call for their rights to be upheld and protected; some others lobby for new rights to be recognised and realised. These worldwide phenomena challenge the existing international (legal and political) system and call for some novel and innovative means by which the new challenges can be addressed. Despite the vastness of research done on the subject matter this monograph suggests an innovative, if not challenging, way of utilising what the field of transitional justice has acquired in the process of examining how societies deal with past abuses to meet victims’ legitimate expectations of justice, truth and reparation. This manuscript will look to expand the field even further by suggesting that there are emerging fields which will, and in some instances already have, influenced the way we think about human rights in a global context. It will set forth new dimensions in conceptualising human rights and how their current and future instances of abuse can be addressed. This is a call to look ahead and into the future by trying to define the inadequacies of the current international system in recognising emerging trends. Understanding the world-wide developments, even if not yet fully legally defined, contributes to the work on combating impunity and ensuring respect for victims’ rights. As it is widely accepted that societies have different means of dealing with past (human) rights abuses thus it would be sensible to suggest that widening understanding of the relationship and cross-reference between the different fields and branches of international legal and political scholarship (all which affect human rights field) should also be encouraged. The Changing International Landscape of Transitional Justice: Emerging Trends and Issues will be a scholarly resource bringing together current knowledge and debates in the field and developing the many areas that are currently underdeveloped in the literature. The book will provide full coverage of the arguments relating to hot topics and controversial issues (e.g. hybrid threats, ecocide, ecological jurisprudence, case studies by practitioners from the human rights field). The invited contributors are all experienced academic writers and practitioners in their respective areas of expertise (law, politics, public policy, cultural studies).

This chapter outlines some of the key debates, challenges and practices of victims and victimology in transitional justice. It begins by discussing who is a victim for the purposes of transitional justice, and the reality of recognition of victimization in the aftermath of mass atrocities. The chapter explores the role of victims in transitional justice processes and mechanisms through the three main rights to justice, truth and reparation, as well as the emerging fourth pillar of transitional justice: guarantees of non-repetition. Victimology is concerned with the study of victimisation, examining how harm impacts victims and wider society, as well as assessing victimisation’s causes, extent and consequences. Domestic criminology and victimology for ordinary crimes have highlighted the plight of victims whose interests have been neglected, and the conflict between perpetrators and themselves ‘stolen’ by the state. In the field of transitional justice, justice is often cited as a key demand of victims of gross violations of human rights and international crimes.