Beyond the liberal-institutional paradigm

Abstract

This chapter explores the non-official use of human rights and transitional justice narratives by victims of state crimes in the context of recent peace processes in Colombia. Against normative state-centric, legalistic understandings of rights and transitional justice, and in agreement with an emerging body of scholarship that has explored how grassroots memory processes proliferate in situations of transition, the chapter analyses a paradigmatic example of a grassroots transitional justice initiative, the play Antígonas, tribunal de mujeres (2014), which weaves together the classical story of Antigone with the narratives of four groups of women victimized by the conflict. Exploring how the play links multiple instances of violence to challenge official human rights narratives of the conflict that minimise crimes committed by the Colombian state, I argue that it draws upon an alternative history of human rights in Colombia rooted in the radical left and projects for social transformation. The chapter thus demonstrates how the play represents a popular tradition of transitional justice rooted in arts-based and creative methodologies that challenges the liberal, state-centered paradigm of human rights discourses. Faced with the delegitimization of their narrative of state victimization by normative legal and political structures, I show how creative and artistic methodologies are currently used by activists in Colombia not simply to provide symbolic recognition and reparation to victims but to articulate alternative truth claims and forms of justice and collective memory that are left out of liberal-institutional human rights narratives.