The Mythology of Transition, Transformation and Development

Abstract

The interactions between transitional justice and development have been largely disregarded by scholars and practitioners. The limited literature exploring their interactions has engaged only with the discourses at the practical or technical levels, and this literature has been couched exclusively in terms of achieving mutual objectives. This paucity of literature and their superficial analyses may be products of uncertainties in the scope and objectives of these fields. This paper thus examines the contemporary myth of transitional justice and development. Recent works by scholars and practitioners have presented transitional justice and development as parallel socioeconomic and political projects, but nonetheless conceptually separate fields and discourses, which engage in marginal intersection or cross-fertilisation. This paper argues that this forced conceptual dichotomy has evolved into a modern mythology, the logic of which merits further scrutiny than has otherwise been documented in existing literature. It seeks to deconstruct this emerging mythology by presenting a Foucaultian analysis of transitional justice, documenting its shared metaphysical foundations and continuing interface with Beard‟s genealogy of development. Further, it examines the interaction of common themes that link the post-fragmentation heuristic episodes of transitional justice and development discourses, and proposes that these themes may provide a basis for formulating a unified theory of transitional justice and development. Ultimately, as one of the first efforts to address this relationship, it also seeks to advance discussion of the manner in which to most effectively pursue transitional justice and development objectives, bridging ideal conceptions of each field with the contingent political exigencies of particular cases.