Art as a Generational and Geographical Transversal Tool in the Hands of Youth: Srebrenica Is Dutch History

Memorial museums are frequently established within transitional justice projects intended to reckon with recent political violence. They play an important role in enabling young people to understand and remember a period of human rights abuses of which they have no direct experience. This paper examines the impact of a memorial museum in Romania which interprets the human rights abuses of the communist period (1947–1989). It uses focus groups with 61 young adults and compares the responses of visitors and non-visitors to assess the impact of the museum on views about the communist past, as well as the role of the museum within post-communist transitional justice. The museum had a limited impact on changing overall perceptions of the communist era but visiting did stimulate reflection on the differences between past and present, and the importance of long-term remembrance; however, these young people were largely skeptical about the museum’s role within broader processes of transitional justice. The paper concludes that it is important to recognize the limits of what memorial museums can achieve, since young people form a range of intergenerational memories about the recent past which a museum is not always able to change.

This chapter examines the importance of transitional justice as a measure to provide remedy for children in cases of massive societal violence, such as armed conflicts, international crimes, or atrocities. It presents different transitional justice initiatives and how they have engaged children, briefly reviewing child-sensitive approaches to criminal accountability, truth-seeking initiatives, reparations programs, and institutional reforms. It recommends that children and young people be consulted and engaged when transitional justice mechanisms and processes are implemented, while protecting their best interests at all times. It highlights the importance of educational reform as a key institutional reform in furthering transitional justice. The chapter proposes that educational reform be positioned as a key instrument for transitional justice, as it plays an important role in children’s recovery, contributing to their cognitive and psychological development while concomitantly advancing social cohesion and long-term peacebuilding.

To support true healing of war-affected populations, including children formerly associated with armed forces and armed groups, transitional justice efforts must attend to the often lasting psychosocial consequences of war in the post-conflict environment. We use key informant and focus group interviews (2002, 2004) to examine the war and post-war experiences of youth, with particular attention to the reintegration experiences of former child soldiers. We found that war-affected youth continued to struggle with a number of issues that thwart their desires and efforts to fulfil their life ambitions, including limited school access, economic instability, social isolation and stigma. Young people were better able to navigate daily stressors when endowed with individual agency and perseverance and surrounded by robust family and community supports. For more troubled youth, social services programmes and formal mental health services set up immediately after the war have not been sustained in Sierra Leone. Voluntary child welfare committees established after the war focused mainly on younger children and largely dissipated with time. Our findings support the need to adopt a broader view of transitional justice to meet the needs of war-affected children and families, particularly former child soldiers. A developmental view of the impact of war experiences on children is needed that includes advocacy for investments in social services to monitor and support healthy family and community reintegration over time. Advocacy pursued under a transitional justice agenda has a role to play in emphasizing the need not just for special courts or truth and reconciliation processes but also for the funding of social services institutions and the development of sustainable health infrastructure, thus helping post-conflict governments to deliver social services to their citizens as part of a strategy to support collective healing and secure peace.

ABSTRACT∞ Young people, or ‘youth’ are one of the key groups affected by armed conflict as well as in the process of transitioning from it. This article explores what a youth-inclusive process of transitional justice may entail. It looks at the reintegration of youth, who were previously associated with armed groups, into civilian lives through Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes and broader community-based initiatives with a prevention focus that lie outside a traditional transitional justice framework. The article scopes the study to the context in Colombia. A selection of programmes is assessed alongside international standards on youth reintegration, particularly the UN Integrated DDR Standards on Youth and complemented with empirical evidence that attests the ways in which youth experience these interventions. In doing so, the article analyzes potential ‘blueprints’ for the programmatic response to youth reintegration and contribute to an under-researched area that links youth, transitional justice and guarantees of non-recurrence.

Younger generations have been increasingly recognized as essential actors in transitional justice and peace building. Still, focus on young people in these settings remains limited and seldom involves young people in the processes that impact them. In this chapter, we argue for expanding how, who, and in what ways youth are considered in transitional societies, as well as how they initiate and participate in local processes of building cultures of peace. We begin by surveying predominant approaches in key areas where transitional processes interface with young people. We aim to identify trends in critiques of three prominent and developed areas of programming, namely, reintegration, education, and memorialization. We then describe everyday peace, which draws attention to how young people cope, respond, and build peace in families, peer groups, schools, and communities. This framework allows space for the contested and challenging complexity of peace in a transitional society. Building on everyday peace, we argue for a developmental approach with recognition of the varied ways that young people make meaning. This expanded focus includes applications for incorporating a broader range of youth and their perspectives and bridging gaps between national processes and young people’s local lives.

Youth are frequently among the primary foot-soldiers in conflict, the victims of violence and the instigators of efforts to advance justice and transformative structural change – whether as former child soldiers, recruits into armed groups, targets of security force abuses or through voluntary participation in protests and dissent that often provoke violent repression. While young people are consequently among the primary objects of transitional justice endeavours, they have nonetheless been strikingly absent from the practice, policy and scholarship of the transitional justice field. This means they have been effectively marginalized in the generation, design, implementation and evaluation of transitional justice programmes and approaches during conflict or in transitions from autocracy to democracy.1 The concern here is not merely about the role or exclusion of youth as a focal point in these transitional justice processes, but the resultant loss of the unique contributions offered through the meaningful participation, creativity and...

As the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions for especially Sierra Leone, Liberia and Peru reveal, the atrocities committed against children are breathtakingly cruel, and committed without any second thought to their sensitivity and vulnerability. As Siegrist argues, in the context that more than half of the populations that are affected by armed conflict are made up of children and young people and that they are often among the most victimized, from this follows that it is necessary for children and youth to be able to participate in transitional justice processes especially at the community level with regards to reconciliation and recovery in order to fulfil the aims of these processes. The context that sexual violence for instance has continued in these countries in the post-conflict phase. Keywords:armed conflict; children; sexual violence; transitional justice

Abstract∞ The role diaspora actors play in transitional justice (TJ) has recently been recognized by practitioners and scholars. This article focuses on how TJ initiatives, by re-emphasizing, retelling or silencing traumas of the past, can play an important role for the transfer of diaspora identity and homeland engagement across generations. Based on research on the diasporas from Rwanda and Sri Lanka, the article highlights the different positions made available for and taken up by young people in TJ, and the ways the past is evoked by the homeland state, diaspora organizations and people they meet in their day-to-day lives. TJ initiatives, the article argues, can serve as critical events that mobilize the young generation to support – or resist – narratives of the past, while also providing them with experiences that add to a postmemory of the painful past of their parents’ homeland.

This article sits at the intersection of two debates in the field of transitional justice. The first concerns the extent to which and how children and young people should participate in transitional justice mechanisms, particularly truth commissions. The second addresses whether the field and its mechanisms should cover socioeconomic harms, alongside civil and political rights violations. The primary argument advanced is that the inclusion of the latter impacts positively on the realization of the former. That is, when transitional justice mechanisms address socioeconomic harms, they create broader opportunities for child participation, increasing the number of children who can engage and amplifying the many benefits that come from their inclusion. This article both lends support to those who advocate for addressing socioeconomic harms in transitional justice, while also contributing to discussions on how to increase and improve child participation in truth commissions.

This article contributes to the empirical evidence concerning the reception of transitional justice processes and the experiences of youth in contexts of authoritarian rule. It explores how eight students in the Gambia receive, perceive and experience learning about what happened in the past by watching the testimonies told at the Truth Reconciliation and Reparations Commission. Based on conversational interviews, I argue that for the students in this study, the past enters the present as rememory. By recalling their rememories, an imaginative re-construction of the Jammeh past emerges which uncovers how the biopoliticized state functioned in everyday life, how loyalty and obedience to Jammeh was indoctrinated from a young age and how children remember. By paying attention to youth’s rememories and perceptions of the revelations of truth commissions, and the meanings they attribute to these revelations, transitional justice scholars and practitioners can gain a more holistic understanding of how youth experience and make sense of transitional justice processes.

Book Review: Young People's History of Holland

The story of South Africa’s liberation struggle, from apartheid to constitutional democracy, is writ large with in-depth contributions from young people. Despite their historical involvement, young people have been noticeably absent from the transitional processes ushering in South Africa’s postapartheid dispensation. Their absence has created a crisis of legitimacy, particularly among those disillusioned young people who are unsentimental about the transition and who are growing increasingly impatient and frustrated with the slow pace of transformation in postapartheid South Africa, in particular within institutions of higher learning. Internationally, South Africa is widely considered as a role model for transitional justice, largely due to its peaceful transference of power from minority rule to the current democratic system. Domestically, however, South Africa’s transition has come under fire for prioritizing reconciliation without simultaneously addressing the social, institutional, political and economic injustices of the past. This article uses the ‘#FeesMustFall’ student protests that swept across South African universities from 2015 to 2017 as a case study for critically discussing whether young people feel South Africa’s transition has been transformative in terms of addressing its colonial and apartheid legacy. Conceptually, the article is rooted within institutional and decolonial transformative justice literature that identifies how the failure of transitional processes to address colonial civil-political and socioeconomic rights can lead to violence. It is argued that the #FeesMustFall protests represented a call for inclusive transitional justice processes that address past inequalities which continue to manifest in the present, including unequal access to free, quality and decolonized education.

Part I: Conceptualising Crime and Criminal Justice in Northern Ireland 1. Crime and Criminal Justice in Northern Ireland: Conflict, Transition and the Legacy of the Past Clare Dwyer and Anne-Marie McAlinden 2. Criminal Justice, Truth Recovery and Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland Cheryl Lawther 3. Bringing Humanity Home: A Transformational Human Rights Culture for Northern Ireland? Colin Harvey 4. Criminal Justice Reform in Northern Ireland: The Agents of Change Brice Dickson 5. Governing Justice Through Risk: The Development of Penal and Social Policies in a Transitional Context Clare Dwyer Part II: The Criminal Justice Process 6. Policing in Transition John Topping 7. Finding 'Merit' in Judicial Appointments: The Northern Ireland Judicial Appointments Commission (NIJAC) and the Search for a New Judiciary for Northern Ireland John Morison 8. Judging and Conflict: Audience, Performance and the Judicial Past Kieran McEvoy and Alex Schwartz 9. Prisons and Imprisonment in Northern Ireland Phil Scraton 10. Prisoner Reintegration in a Transitional Society: The Northern Ireland Experience Clare Dwyer 11. Probation and Community Sanctions in Northern Ireland: Historical and Contemporary Contexts Nicola Carr 12. Revisiting the Past: Miscarriages of Justice, the Courts and Transition Marny Requa Part III: Contemporary Issues in Criminal Justice 13. Transition, Women and Criminal Justice in Northern Ireland Linda Moore and Azrini Wahidin 14. Young People, Crime and Justice in Northern Ireland Deena Haydon and Siobhan McAlister 15. Public and Official Responses to Sexual and Violent Crime in Northern Ireland Anne-Marie McAlinden 16. Restorative Justice in the Northern Ireland Transition Anna Eriksson Part IV: Overview and Prospects 17. 'Doing' Criminal Justice in Northern Ireland: 'Policy Transfer', Transitional Justice and Governing Through the Past Anne-Marie McAlinden and Clare Dwyer

The Boko Haram insurgency has inflicted profound disruption on communities in northeast Nigeria, with Gujba Local Government Area (LGA) among the most severely affected. Although transitional justice (TJ) initiatives have been introduced to address human rights violations, youth participation has remained limited and largely symbolic. This article examines the specific roles that young people occupy in TJ processes in Gujba LGA and proposes a strategic communication framework to enhance their substantive engagement. A mixed methods design was employed, with quantitative data from a structured survey of 300 youths (187 male, 113 female) and qualitative insights drawn from 13 key informant interviews. Findings reveal that while 40% of respondents have ever attended TJ events, attendance is typically confined to community reconciliation (60%), with minimal involvement in policy workshops (25%). Youth contributions frequently remain logistical or testimonial rather than consultative. Demographic analysis indicates higher participation among those aged 20–24 and individuals with post-secondary education, whereas farmers and young women face pronounced barriers. Drawing on framing and diffusion theories, the article outlines a seven-step advocacy campaign encompassing tailored messages in local languages, multi-channel dissemination (radio, town criers, mobile messaging) and culturally sensitive formats (women only sessions, youth led media). Preliminary pilot data suggest that targeted messaging can raise awareness from 35% to over 60% and increase active speaking roles among participants by 30%. The proposed framework offers policymakers and practitioners a replicable model for transforming youth from passive observers to active stakeholders in TJ, thereby strengthening the legitimacy and effectiveness of post conflict recovery processes.

ABSTRACTInterventions such as courts and truth commissions are elements of an internationally established transitional justice (TJ) toolkit. Such measures are rarely sustainable or in place after the occurrence of mass violence. Those affected then have to themselves get active to restore social relationships. Civil society plays an important role in these transitions, but civil society also needs to be scrutinised to deconstruct reductionist conceptualisations in TJ discourses. Taking the Moluccan conflict and peace process as a case study, this paper looks into alternative ways that communities seek to transition from violence to peace and in the process ask for forms of justice not exclusively related to physical violence. Instead, communities focus on continuing social injustices that they believe underlie this violence. Analysis of the case study promotes an understanding of TJ not primarily as transitional, but as transformative and performative. In this way locally driven transitional justice mechanisms look not only into the past and legacies of violence, but also into legacies of harmony and peace and the emergence of integrative means in the future. The case study shows that forms of art in Maluku were turned into a force that aimed to reintegrate society divided by violence and unite society to resist exploitation and suppression by outside forces. Young people played important roles in this dynamic. The search for reconciliation in Maluku was in this way transformed into a broader struggle against structural violence and destructive outside interventions and for social justice and sustainable peace.