Rethinking civil society and transitional justice: lessons from social movements and ‘new’ civil society

Paul Gready,Simon Robins

doi:10.1080/13642987.2017.1313237

Abstract

ABSTRACTTransitional justice has often reduced conceptions of civil society to human rights NGOs, and lacks a rigorous conceptualisation of the role that civil society plays in transitional justice processes. It largely ignores as political actors the social movements that have driven democratisation in various parts of the world and can be credited as integral to the creation of the discourse of transitional justice. While transitional justice in theory and practice remains focused on traditional civil society, institutions and the state, recent transitions highlight that change is driven by a range of different actors, often using modes of organisation and repertoires of action linked to social movement modalities and other forms of collective action. As such we coin the term ‘new’ civil society, associated with events such as the Arab Spring and austerity-led protests in Southern Europe, to argue that it provides new models for understanding change and justice in transition. An effort is made to conceptualise the roles civil society can play in shaping transitional justice and the ‘new’ civil society framework is used to understand how such actors actively contest mainstream social, political and transitional paradigms, and model alternatives to them. ‘New’ civil society actors rethink how justice and rights are understood in transition, and model alternatives that constitute new forms of transitional politics.

Highlights

The central contention of this article is that the field of transitional justice lacks a comprehensive and rigorous conceptualisation of the role that civil society plays in transitional justice processes
Transitional justice has often reduced conceptions of civil society to human rights non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and lacks a rigorous conceptualisation of the role that civil society plays in transitional justice processes
While transitional justice in theory and practice remains focused on traditional civil society, institutions and the state, recent transitions highlight that change is driven by a range of different actors, often using modes of organisation and repertoires of action linked to social movement modalities and other forms of collective action

Summary

Introduction

The central contention of this article is that the field of transitional justice lacks a comprehensive and rigorous conceptualisation of the role that civil society plays in transitional justice processes. Both new civil society and social movements can offer a prefigurative politics, embodying within the ongoing political practice of a movement those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture and human experience that are its ultimate goal As such, this creates spaces to re-imagine and model alternative approaches for rights and justice in transition.[10] We use the term new because the forms and agendas of civil society being discussed suggest that the shifts associated with a populist, post-truth era in politics are affecting civil society – with an emergent, unpredictable and more diverse sector developing, which is hostile to both mainstream formal politics and mainstream civil society, including NGOs and social movements.[11] We define new civil society in terms of the plural nature of the ‘justice’ it seeks to advance, its return to the economic as its priority consideration (as opposed to civil-political rights or identity politics), the way such actors organise and mobilise, and the repertoires of action they adopt, for example, many such actors use explicitly ‘unruly’ tactics. Championing the modelling of alternatives and globalisation through citizen action would lead to a form of justice in transition which encompasses greater diversity, and local inflexion, in understandings of politics, justice and rights

Conclusion

Notes on contributors