Translocal lessons from transitional justice in Colombia: Truth, art, and memory to advance human rights and transform societies

Abstract

This article highlights the expansion of traditional concepts of transitional justice in Colombia to include an emphasis on human rights and the empowerment of marginalized communities. It describes how grassroots truth processes, collective art projects, and memory work have been essential to a transitional justice experiment that challenges dominant national narratives and power structures. It argues that Colombia’s experience may provide lessons for other political communities across the globe that are struggling to address legacies of past injustice, ongoing structural violence, and a rise in xenophobic nationalism. More broadly, it examines how this experiment might inform a model for political imaginaries based on social connections across differences—one that can compete with the power of nationalist myths of singular community. Importantly, it suggests the opportunity for horizontal borrowings via translocal networks of innovative human rights practices worldwide, not necessarily mediated by Global North institutions. This illustrates the contention that human rights globalization can operate through local advocacy.