Youth and Transitional Justice

This study investigated the role of mediation in grassroots transitional justice processes. The major aim of the study was to understand the role of mediation in transitional justice processes, ascertaining its effectiveness as a grassroots transitional justice mechanism and how its demand for use in transitional justice can be increased. The study was carried out using action research methodologies, with a mediation project carried out in the Makoni District of Manicaland in Zimbabwe. The mediation project involved community members addressing transitional-justice-related conflicts using mediation as a tool for conflict resolution. The mediators were provided with mediation skills through a training programme and their work was evaluated thrice to ascertain the role and impact of the mediation interventions on transitional-justicerelated conflicts. The project was termed Mediation for Everyday Transitional Justice because it was implemented in a natural community’s daily environment, by local people and for the local communities. The continuing failure of transitional justice mechanisms in Zimbabwe amid continued human rights violations justifies the undeniable value of this study. Zimbabwe’s past transitional justice efforts (since 1980, when the country became an independent republic) failed to build sustainable peace hence the country’s continued relapse into political and socio-economic turmoil. However, with appropriate transitional justice interventions that are built on grassroots-informed processes, sustainable peace is conceivable in Zimbabwe. Mediation, as an alternative dispute resolution process that is both persuasive and non-retributive, offers an interesting opportunity to the practice of transitional justice. The research concluded that the role of mediation in transitional justice is to facilitate truth telling, reparations, healing, and reconciliation among disputants without the need to use national-level transitional justice infrastructures. This means that, at the grassroots level, transitional justice processes can take place without waiting for the statist transitional justice approaches. However, in cases where the past human rights violations being addressed are tied to structural violence, driven from outside the community, local mediation processes may not be possible without the consent, cooperation, and willingness of those who sustain such conflicts. In addition, mediation cannot play any significant role in enabling prosecutorial justice, memorialisation, and institutional reforms at the grassroots level. Prosecutorial justice cannot be achieved because perpetrators can withdraw quickly when possibilities exist to be held criminally accountable for past human rights abuses. Institutional reforms also require changing governance policies and practices which are issues beyond the control of specific local communities. The study also observed that mediation is an effective tool for grassroots transitional justice issues because it is efficient, it saves time and financial resources, and it can be undertaken by local actors. To increase its demand and use in transitional justice processes at the grassroots level, these is a need to increase communities’ awareness of the importance of mediation in transitional justice, provide mediation-skills capacity-development interventions to potential mediators, and enhance the agency of various mediation actors at the grassroots levels.

ABSTRACTEducation is acknowledged as a component of transitional justice processes, yet details about how to implement education reform in postconflict societies are underexplored and politicized [King, Elisabeth. 2014. From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda. New York: Cambridge University Press]. Local and international actors often neglect the complicated nature of education reform in postconflict societies undergoing transitional justice processes [Jones, Briony. 2015. "Educating Citizens in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Experiences and Contradictions in Post-war Education Reform." In Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Lessons from the Balkans, edited by Martina Fischer, and Olivera Simic, 193–208. New York: Routledge. Transitional Justice]. The role of the diaspora in transitional justice has been increasingly explored as a participatory transnational actor with influence and knowledge about local dynamics [Roht-Arriaza, Naomi. 2006. The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Haider, Huma. 2008. “(Re)Imagining Coexistence: Striving for Sustainable Return, Reintegration and Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ”International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (1): 91–113; Young, Laura, and Rosalyn Park. 2009.“ Engaging Diasporas in Truth Commissions: Lessons from the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission Diaspora Project.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (3): 341–361; Koinova, Maria, and Dženeta Karabegović. 2017.“ Diasporas and Transitional Justice: Transnational Activism from Local to Global Levels of Engagement.” Global Networks 17 (2): 212–233]. This article bridges academic literature about diaspora engagement and transitional justice, and education and transitional justice by incorporating the role of diaspora actors in post-conflict processes. Using empirical data from multi-sited field work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and France, it examines diaspora initiatives which aim to influence local transitional justice processes through translocal community involvement in education and youth policy. It argues that diaspora initiatives can provide alternative and intermediate solutions to the status quo in their homeland, with some potential for contributing to transitional justice and reconciliation processes. Ultimately, diaspora initiatives need support from homeland institutions in order to forward transitional justice agendas in post-conflict societies.

This article reflects upon the ways in which transitional justice debates and processes impacted Tunisia's transition. It explores key questions such as what demands for justice emerged in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution? Did Tunisia's transitional justice process reflect these demands? And, did international norms of transitional justice, which emerged from a field of practice that draws heavily upon European, Latin America and Sub‐Saharan experiences, but has largely excluded the Arab Middle East, serve to mediate between competing demands for justice in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution? It will be argued that transitional justice demands in Tunisia reflected a breakdown in the state–society socioeconomic bargain, which had maintained autocratic regimes since independence in 1956; however, due to the elite‐centred nature of transitional justice discourses, many transitional justice demands never resonated into mainstream transitional justice discourse. We will argue that international transitional justice entrepreneurs' attempt to import a normative framework that was ill suited to grapple with the complex legacies of socioeconomic marginalization, resulted in a growing disillusionment and disengagement from the state driven transitional justice process on the part of Tunisian society.

Foreword, Edith Brown-Weiss Introduction, Lisa Yarwood Part 1: The Recognition and Contribution of Women in Transitional Justice Theory 1. Intersectional Feminist Theory for Transitional Society, Eilish Rooney 2. The Recognition of Gender Crimes in the International Courts, Caroline Fournet 3. Denial, Impunity and Transitional Justice: The Fate of Female Rape Victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Clotilde Pegorier 4. Women, Peace and Security: Mainstreaming Gender in Transitional Justice Processes, Amy Barrow Part 2: Women as Protagonists in the Transitional Justice Process 5. The Role of Women Asylum Seekers in International Transitional Justice Processes in the Conflict State and the Asylum State, Sarah Maddox 6. Women as Post Conflict Community Builders:The East Timor Experience, Nicole Turner 7. The Role of International Prosecutors in Facilitating Transitional Justice for Women, Andra Mobberley Part 3:Women as Participants in Transitional Justice 8. The Legacy of Gender Issues at the ICTR, Clair Duffy 9. Promoting Gender in Transitional Justice Processes: The Role of the United Nations, Nahla Valji 10. Protecting the Rights of the Girl Child in Transitional Justice, Annelotte Dekker 11. Women Survivors and Transitional Justice, Polly Dewhirst 12. Gender and Transitional Justice in South Africa, Helen Scanlon Part 4: The Role of Women in Non-Traditional Transitional Justice Processes 13. Women, Transitional Justice and Indigenous Conflict: The Role of Women in Addressing New Zealand's Colonial Past, Lisa Yarwood 14. Reparations in Latin America from a Gender Perspective, Catalina Diaz 15. Julissa Mantilla 16. Conclusion, Lisa Yarwood

The determination of truth in the aftermath of war aiming at establishing justice and peace is a key element of a transitional justice (TJ) process. The theory of justice of Roland Dworkin deals with an approach in which the interpretation of values such as equality, liberty or truth are paramount. Dworkin’s theory of justice is applied to constitutional states and lays out how democratic values are negotiated. The goal of a TJ process is to lead a state towards democracy after a war or internal armed conflict. TJ processes as well as Dworkin’s theory of justice are to be understood as dynamic, which implies that they are subject to constant change and thus to be considered in their respective social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. This paper explores the relationship between truth and justice in the framework of a TJ trial and Roland Dworkin’s theory of justice. The TJ process in Colombia serves as a case study because that was where I conducted field research in TJ in 2019.

Process Pluralism in Transitional-Restorative Justice: Lessons from Dispute Resolution for Cultural Variations in Goals Beyond Rule of Law and Democracy Development (Argentina and Chile) This article reviews some of the key issues in transitional justice process and institutional design, based on my research and experience working and living in several post-conflict societies, and suggests that cultural and political variations in transitional justice design, practices, and processes are necessary to accomplish plural goals. The idea of process pluralism, derived from the more general fields of conflict resolution and ‘alternative dispute resolution’ in legal contexts, is an essential part of transitional justice, where multiple processes may occur simultaneously or in sequence over time (e.g. truth and reconciliation processes, with or without amnesty, prosecutions, lustration and/or more local legal and communitarian processes), depending on both individual and collective preferences and resources. Transitional justice is itself ‘in transition’ as iterative learning has developed from assessment of different processes in different contexts (post-military dictatorships, civil wars, and international and sub-national conflicts). This article draws on examples from Argentina’s and Chile’s emergence from post-military dictatorships to describe and analyze a plurality of processes, including more formal governmental processes, but also those formed by civil society groups at sub-national levels. This article suggests that ‘democracy development’ and legalistic ‘rule of law’ goals and institutional design may not necessarily be the only desiderata in transitional justice, where more than the ‘legal’ and ‘governmental’ is at stake for more peaceful human flourishing. To use an important concept from dispute resolution, the “forum must fit the fuss”, and there are many different kinds of ‘fusses’ to be dealt with in transitional justice, at different levels of society – more than legal and governmental but also social, cultural and reparative.

Reviewed by: The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality ed. by Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot Laura Seay Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot , eds. The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality. London and New York: Zed Books, 2010. xi + 356 pp. Maps. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. £19.99/$35.95. Paper. The March 2012 release of the online video titled Kony 2012 by the American advocacy group that calls itself Invisible Children brought global attention to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group. Critics of Invisible Children were quick to point out the film’s many [End Page 184] shortcomings, including its oversimplification of a complex crisis, the implicit suggestion that there is still active warfare in northern Uganda, and a noticeable lack of African voices in a film ostensibly made to help them. Kony 2012 also overstated the LRA’s current force strength and capacities; far from being the “world’s worst warlord,” as the film called him, Joseph Kony and his forces are significantly smaller and less powerful than they were a decade ago. Moreover, the film’s proposed solution to the LRA crisis—hunting down Kony and either killing him or bringing him before an international court—ignored the fact that previous efforts in this vein have repeatedly failed and even resulted in retaliation against civilians. Global interest in the LRA crisis is at a peak, even as misinformation about the organization, its capacities, and what it would take to destroy the LRA proliferates. This makes the contributions of the authors in The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality quite timely. The contributors provide important counterpoints to many popular misconceptions about the movement based on extensive fieldwork and novel research methods. Understanding the logic of Kony’s approach is a key theme of the book and one that those working in the region will find of great interest. Far from being irrational, Kony and the LRA have specific political grievances against the government that are broadly shared in the Acholi population of northern Uganda. Adam Branch shows that the LRA insurgency cannot rightly be understood apart from the broader history of Ugandan ethnic identity politics and from internal political crises in Acholi society. This theme runs throughout the book’s chapters; the LRA is not simply an army of anarchist, lunatic “bad guys,” but is rather a complex movement with political, economic, and spiritual dimensions. Reflecting on her interview of Joseph Kony, Mareike Schomerus observes, “the LRA’s understanding of trust and betrayal, of accountability and culpability, of right and wrong is complex, but not simply unreasonable. Kony denied the atrocities, but what else would anyone expect?” (111). Kristof Titeca furthers this point, showing that spirituality in the LRA serves strategic interests as a mechanism for keeping the movement unified and disciplined. Other excellent and useful contributions come from authors attempting to make sense of efforts to make peace with Kony or bring him to justice, as well as to implement reconciliation and transitional justice programs. Of particular value is the perspective of Ronald Iya, a traditional Madi leader who notes that most in his community believe Kony’s crimes are too extensive and serious to be handled through traditional justice mechanisms. Sandrine Perrot notes that efforts to address the crisis were undermined by its having been framed as a local, primarily humanitarian crisis rather than as part of a broad international and regional set of conflicts. As Branch notes, the only viable long-term solution to the crisis in Acholiland must integrate and institutionalize broad participation in Ugandan political life and discourses. [End Page 185] Many of the contributors’ findings challenge conventional wisdom on the experiences of child soldiers and transitional justice processes. Ben Mergelsberg demonstrates from his interviews with former abducted child soldiers that the LRA’s members are not simply passive victims. Indeed, he finds that former child soldiers are “active survivors with a good sense of who they were fighting, how they survived and what they needed most after their return from the LRA” (157). Likewise, Christopher Blattman and Jeannie Annan find that the LRA’s targeting of child soldiers is far from random, but is rather part of a...

Psychosocial Support for Children

Since 2008, the Government of Zimbabwe, the international community and non-governmental organisations have all advocated the need for transitional justice in Zimbabwe. Yet, few initiatives have emerged. This article suggests that local communities could be enabled to help fill this policy vacuum. The results of a pilot research project are presented, where 1,400 victims of violence were engaged. The data collected highlights a clear demand for justice at the grassroots, but an educational input is necessary and transitional justice capacity needs to be built. Currently unstructured and unorganised opinions on how to cope with past violence need to be translated into practical programmes of action. The article asserts that such leadership, stimulated from the grassroots, represents a potential strategy capable of challenging the existing policy vacuum. Even if this challenge is initially rebuffed, it is contended that such an input still remains vital for the longer term. An opportunity currently exists to deepen an understanding of transitional justice in Zimbabwe which will enable community groups to initiate and respond to Zimbabwe's transitional justice processes when the national political environment becomes more receptive to this need.

Reflecting on the case study of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), this article asks how transitional justice (TJ) processes account for the complexity of victimhood in political violence and mass atrocity. It speaks to the critical scholarship which questions the use of simplistic dichotomies of (innocent) victims versus (guilty) perpetrators in TJ processes. Findings from empirical, qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2013 and 2014 show that both inclusion and exclusion dynamics towards complex political victims take place at the ECCC. Whilst most critical scholarship questions the exclusion of complex political victims from TJ processes, this article highlights the limitations and challenges of both the inclusion and the exclusion of such victims. It argues that the complexity of victimhood in contexts of mass atrocity poses vexing questions to TJ scholars and practitioners that have yet to be addressed.

This article surveys the literature on participation in transitional justice (TJ) focusing primarily on victims and bottom-up actors. We argue that often the preoccupation in TJ has been with greater rather than more meaningful participation, and that there needs to be a concerted effort to focus on everyday actors, including their voices, needs and priorities. Consideration also needs to be given as to whether meaningful participation can occur without genuine obligation and commitment to heeding participants’ input, and greater consideration is required to measure and build an evidence-base regarding participatory TJ efforts and their outcomes. We advocate for further discussion in theory and in practice about how participation in TJ can be reimagined toward actor oriented, bottom-up led processes that lead to meaningful outcomes. We suggest that TJ specific participation considerations are required and refer to existing theoretical considerations and models from other disciplines and sectors as helpful departure points.

This article considers how regional integration in Europe has informed processes of collective remembrance and transitional justice in Central and Eastern Europe. By taking the cases of Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic, two claims are made. First, although European institutions have not initiated top-down projects of historical reckoning, activists who have an interest in promoting engagement with the recent past have been able to draw the political, financial and/or judicial weight of European institutions behind particular reckoning initiatives, on anad hocbasis. Second, the nature of the projects that have been realized with the assistance of European resources has varied across the region, according to the extent of prior efforts to promote collective remembrance and transitional justice at the national level. Where there have previously been constraints on historical reckoning, activists have drawn “Europe” behind efforts to promote national-level confrontations with particularly national experiences of communist rule. By contrast, where there has previously been extensive state sponsorship of collective remembrance projects and/or processes of transitional justice, European resources have been used in support of efforts to raise awareness of the repressions of communist rule, and transitions from that system of rule, among a wider, international audience.

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines how multifarious levels of division among victim constituencies have shaped legal and non-legal transitional justice responses to human rights violations. It submits that this division has caused such responses to operate in accordance with the notion of being a ‘victim of’ rather than that of simply being a victim of human rights abuse per se. Expanding from this position, it proffers the theoretical viewpoint that transitional justice responses are premised on the nuanced typologies of being a victim of a particular perpetrator or being a victim of a particular harm or being a victim of particular circumstances. When determining which victims to offer redress to, which victimisers to punish and which harms to repair, these approaches have by necessity fallen back on hierarchies that favour certain victims and harms above others. This process of hierarchisation is multi-layered and involves interplay between ideological, gendered and class-based factors that place certain victims outside the reach of transitional justice discourses and processes. The exclusion of these victims, the article argues, creates an invisibilised category of victims of the peace that fail to benefit from transitional justice processes that struggle to deal with the complexity their situations present.

Nepal’s transitional justice process, initiated after the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord, has been repeatedly hindered by political interference, legal ambiguity, and institutional inertia. Despite multiple cycles of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP), the experiences of women—particularly victims of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), widows, and female ex combatants—remain systematically excluded. This paper examines the gendered and intersectional failures of Nepal’s transitional justice framework through a feminist lens. It critiques the state’s reliance on patriarchal evidentiary norms, token participation, and structural silence, especially in how sexual violence, enforced disappearance, and reintegration are addressed. Drawing on victim testimonies, legal rulings, UN recommendations, and provincial consultations held in 2025, this paper argues that Nepal’s transitional justice must be fundamentally remained as a victim-centered, gender-responsive process. It concludes by offering concrete legal and institutional reforms to advance an inclusive and transformative model of justice.

BackgroundWorldwide, thousands of children are acting in different roles in armed groups. Whereas human rights activism and humanitarian imperatives tend to emphasize the image of child soldiers as incapable victims of adults’ abusive compulsion, this image does not fully correspond with prevailing pedagogical and jurisprudential discourses, nor does it represent all child soldiers’ own perceptions of their role. Moreover, contemporary warfare is often marked by fuzzy distinctions between perpetrators and victims. This article deepens on the question how to conceptualize the victim-perpetrator imaginary about child soldiers, starting from three disciplines, children’s rights law, psychosocial approaches and transitional justice, and then proceeding into an interdisciplinary approach.DiscussionWe argue that the victim–perpetrator dichotomy in relation to child soldiers needs to be revisited, and that this can only be done successfully through a truly interdisciplinary approach. Key to this interdisciplinary dialogue is the growing awareness within all three disciplines, but admittedly only marginally within children’s rights law, that only by moving beyond the binary distinction between victim- and perpetrator-hood, the complexity of childhood soldiering can be grasped. In transitional justice, the concept of role reversal has been instructive, and in psychosocial studies, emphasis has been put on the ‘agency’ of (former) child soldiers, whereby child soldiers sometimes account on how joining the armed force or group was (partially) out of their own free will. Hence, child soldiers’ perpetrator-hood is not only part of the way child soldiers are perceived in the communities they return to, but equally of the way they see themselves. These findings plea for more contextualized approaches, including a greater participation of child soldiers, the elaboration of accountability mechanisms beyond criminal responsibility, and an intimate connection between individual, social and societal healing by paying more attention to reconciliation.SummaryThis article deepens on the question how to conceptualize the victim-perpetrator imaginary about child soldiers through an interdisciplinary dialogue between children’s rights law, psychosocial approaches and transitional justice. With this interdisciplinary perspective, we intend to open up narrow disciplinary viewpoints, and contribute to more integrated approaches, beyond a binary distinction between victimhood and perpetrator-hood.