Transitional Justice Interventions Research Articles

The Paradox of Diasporic Peacebuilding Amidst Violence: Providing Reparations to Colombians Abroad

ABSTRACT: This article uses the case of Colombian migrants in the United States (U.S.) who are registered with the Colombian Unit for Victims to illustrate the tension that emerges when a home country commits to reparations for nationals in exile when violence in their home country has not ceased. Bridging studies on transitional justice, diasporas, and displacement, we show the disconnect between the Colombian state's original goal to assist with return as the primary form of reparation and displaced Colombians' goals for stability, particularly legal status, abroad. Through interviews with Colombian officials and U.S.-based migrants, our findings show the unique dynamics of transnational reparations and the specific issue facing migrants from war-torn countries when their country of origin engages in transitional justice interventions.

Making home alive again after war: Acoli Kaka’s Indigenous land sovereignties in Northern Uganda

AbstractAfter the war between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army (1986‐2006), 90 per cent of the displaced rural population in Northern Uganda returned to small‐scale farming on their ancestral lands and their systems of communal land stewardship. At the time, there was much debate about transitional justice interventions to address war's violence, but in that same period over 85 per cent of Acoli chiefdoms saw affiliated clans, or kin‐based political communities (kaka), negotiate to write down their Indigenous governance constitutions for the first time. Acoli Kaka’s return to their ancestral lands and small‐scale farming, and subsequent engagements with tekwaro – Indigenous knowledge – through constitution writing, served to strengthen Indigenous governance and law after their weakening in contexts of war and displacement. It is argued here that these engagements and negotiations rooted in the land, regardless of their outcomes, served to orient relationships away from the fragmenting, unprecedented, forced Acoli‐on‐Acoli violence experienced during the war. A resurgence of Acoli Kaka’s Indigenous law and governance rooted in communal land stewardship is linked to relational repair and supports calls for transitional justice processes to nurture and respect Indigenous land rights. These ethnographic arguments also lend support to kaka’s ongoing efforts towards clan unity (ribbe kaka) and to secure communal land sovereignties.

Transitional Justice Networks and the Role of ‘local’ Actors in Cambodia

Debates over localisation in transitional justice and peacebuilding have been characterised by the assumption that more equitable relationships between local and international actors allow for more effective and just interventions. Critical scholarship has in turn cautioned over the use of reified conceptions of the ‘local’ and ‘international’, emphasising each as contested sites. Through a network analysis of transitional justice event data in Cambodia, we ask: what are the roles and influence of Cambodian actors, and what might their positions tell us about the relationships between international and local groups? We find that event data shows strong local representation within the transitional justice community. However, representation is not synonymous with influence. Our data demonstrates an uneven distribution of network positions within both local and international groupings. This illustrates the need for greater attention to the role of individual biographies that advantage certain individuals to shape transitional justice interventions.

Who is Being Served? How Competing Norms and Values Shape the Transitional Justice Agenda in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT Any transitional justice process involves a multiplicity of actors and competing norms and values that shape the transitional justice agenda. This article is concerned with the ways competing norms and values have shaped the transitional justice agenda in Zimbabwe. It makes the argument that the privileging of a neoliberalist perspective, as well as a human rights discourse in dealing with the concerns of post-conflict societies, has posed challenges for meaningful transitional justice interventions in Zimbabwe and on the African continent and suggests a nuanced approach to transitional justice that captures the history, culture and other dynamics that shape a country’s politics. This article draws from interviews with four civil society activists and scholars on transitional justice in Zimbabwe, as well as narratives are drawn from a categorical content analysis of the reports and other publications of four civil society organisations – Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (ZHRNGOF), Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), Amnesty International (Zimbabwe) and Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZIMRIGHTS). The civil society organisations and activists were purposively sampled based on the work they have done in the area under study, as well as their understanding of the context and its nuanced complexities.

The Politics of Time, Transition, and Justice in Transitional Justice

Abstract As transitional justice seeks to reckon with a violent past in order to build a more peaceful future, its practitioners tend to operate on the assumption that the past, present and future are distinct periods. Globally, however, as different regions and states undergo different phases of transitional justice, it is difficult to identify linear processes of transition and of justice. When understood as a fluid process, transitional justice elicits questions about how governments, judiciaries, civil society, and victims engage with it as a vehicle for political change, repression, and justice. This engagement constitutes a complex set of interactions, ebbs, and flows that take place across space and time. With the benefit of hindsight and a mosaic of transitions, this special issue aims to recognise and interrogate the centrality and complexity of time in transition, justice, and transitional justice. The authors discuss five overarching dimensions of time: the timing of transitional justice interventions, the institutionalisation of time, the compartmentalisation of time, the politicisation of time, and ways to reconcile the temporal dichotomies of various transitional justice mechanisms

Using restorative justice to rethink the temporality of transition in Chile

Assumptions of linear progress and a clean break with the past have long characterised transitional justice interventions. This notion of temporality has increasingly been problematised in transitional justice scholarship and practice. Scholars have argued that a more complex understanding of temporalities is needed that better accommodates the temporal messiness and complexity of transitions, including their ongoingness, multilayeredness and multidirectionality. Existing critiques, however, have not yet resulted in a new conceptual framework for thinking about transitional temporalities. This article builds on insights from the field of restorative justice to develop such a framework. This framework foregrounds longer timelines, multilayered temporalities and temporal ecologies to better reflect reality on the ground and victims’ lived experiences. We argue that restorative justice is a useful starting point to develop such a temporal framework because of its actor-oriented, flexible and interactive nature and proximity to the field of transitional justice. Throughout this article we use the case of Chile to illustrate some of the complex temporal dynamics of transition and to illustrate what a more context-sensitive temporal lens could mean for such cases of un/finished transition.

Historical injustices and transitional justice interventions in Kenya: victims� and interveners� experiences and perceptions

This article examines historical injustices and transitional justice interventions that were initiated after the 2007 electoral conflict in the quest for conflict transformation in Kenya. During the mediation led by Kofi Annan that culminated in the signing of the National Accord in February 2008, transitional justice was emphasised as critical in attaining conflict transformation. In response, the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) and International Criminal Court (ICC) interventions initiated a complementary restorative�retributive approach in the pursuit of transitional justice in the country. Based on content analysis of fieldwork data extracted from twenty-five focus group discussions within a sampled cluster of ten counties, this study examines and presents the experiences and perceptions of victims of historical injustices, on the one hand, and the experiences and perceptions of interveners of conflict transformation programmes, on the other hand. This is with a view to explicating the outcomes and impacts of transitional justice interventions in conflict transformation in Kenya in the post-National Accord era. In the findings, a key argument is raised that unresolved three-tier historical injustices remain critical constraints in the pursuit of transitional justice and in the quest for effective conflict transformation in Kenya.

The performance and persistence of transitional justice and its ways of knowing atrocity.

Transitional justice, like other peacebuilding endeavours, strives to create change in the world and to produce knowledge that is useful. However, the politics of how this knowledge is produced, shared and rendered legitimate depends upon the relationships between different epistemic communities, the way in which transitional justice has developed as a field and the myriad contexts in which it is embedded at local, national and international levels. In particular, forms of ‘expert’ knowledge tend to be legal, foreign and based on models to be replicated elsewhere. Work on epistemic communities of peacebuilding can be usefully brought to bear on transitional justice, speaking to current debates in the literature on positionality, justice from below, marginalisation and knowledge imperialism. This article offers two contributions to the field of transitional justice: (1) an analysis of the way the field has developed as an epistemic community(ies) and the relevance of this for a politics of knowledge; and (2) an argument for the politics of knowledge to be more widely discussed and understood as a factor in shaping transitional justice policy and practice, and as a call to a more ethical relationship with the supposed beneficiaries of transitional justice interventions.

The ICTY and Forced Elite Change in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Despite the fact that transitional justice measures have become established components of most modern peacebuilding efforts, existing understandings of complex causal pathways that link transitional justice interventions to their supposed goal of reconciliation in deeply divided societies continue to remain largely underspecified and under-theorized. This article empirically investigates the impact of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on reconciliation in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. After a detailed process-tracing study of reconciliation in the town, it proposes that the ICTY has contributed to socio-political and institutional reconciliation via the mechanism of forced elite change.

NGO Interventions in the Post-conflict Memoryscape. The Effect of Competing ‘Mnemonic Role Attributions’ on Reconciliation in Cambodia

ABSTRACTNon-governmental organisations (NGOs) are a constituent part of post-conflict Transitional Justice interventions and as such their projects shape but are also constrained by various narratives about the past. This article introduces the concept of mnemonic role attributions defined as the sum of how actors, their roles, their responsibility and their suffering are categorised as they are remembered regarding a certain period of time. The article analyses how different mnemonic role attributions that are propagated during interventions by Transitional Justice experts in civil society influence the potential for reconciliation in post-conflict Cambodia.

Performative justice? The role of theatre and performance in facilitating transitional justice

Interactions between theatre and performance studies and trauma and memory studies have grown in depth and ampleur in the last two decades. Theatre and performance can offer new perspectives on, and potential coping mechanisms for, dealing with trauma that are also salient to other fields of study, such as transitional justice. Literature on transitional justice deals with the question of how societies can deal with violence and trauma inflicted by predecessor regimes. This literature stands to be enriched by theatre and performance scholars’ experience with the transformation of trauma, violence, complexity and confusion. Yet, the dominance of legal practitioners in this field has given rise to a learned blind spot for theatre and performance studies, and also scholars in the field of theatre and performance studies themselves have been reluctant to address transitional justice practitioners and scholars. This article proposes a normative and praxis-based perspective on the potential and desirability of integrating insights from the field of theatre and performance studies into transitional justice studies. I do not consider one specific – set of – plays, but rather the techniques and assumptions which theatre makers have been using in their work in transitional societies. The article urges theatre and performance scholars to engage more fully with the domain of transitional justice, in order to increase the legitimacy of performance-based initiatives in the context of transitional justice interventions and to recast some of the basic assumptions of the transitional justice architecture.

What We Know About Transitional Justice: Survey and Experimental Evidence

Transitional justice encompasses a variety of measures devised to overcome legacies of gross human rights violations and other historical injustices. The spread of international criminal tribunals, truth commissions, inclusive alternatives to purges, and apologies represents one of the most fascinating intellectual developments in legal and social studies. What do we know about the social efficacy of transitional justice measures? This article reviews 25 studies that provided quantitative evidence about the effects of transitional justice gathered at the individual‐level analysis and situates them in the context of other studies on major transitional justice interventions: truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, lustration (vetting), reparation, and apologies. The article concludes that (1) transitional justice matters in dealing with the past; (2) justice is understood as a social‐political category rather than a legal category; (3) past experiences affect attitudes to transitional justice as well as its outcomes; (4) different victims have needs for different transitional justice measures; (5) the outcomes of transitional justice depend on its context and implementation; (6) truth‐sharing may produce both positive and negative effects; and (7) reconciliatory measures may produce positive social effects.

Naming and Shaming Victims: The Semantics of Victimhood

This article examines how victimhood is constructed on a daily basis in postconflict Peru. It seeks to advance the empirical study of the politics of victimhood and analyzes how external modes of identification of Peruvian victim-survivors influence the selfidentification processes and the collective action strategies of organized victimsurvivors. The article shows that the uses of the notion of victimhood influence the degree to which victim-survivors receive legal, political and social recognition, as well as the degree to which their role as active citizens with an ability to vocalize and represent their claims is accepted. The overall argument is that deconstructing the side effects of transitional justice interventions on relationships between social organizations is important for enhancing understanding of the possibilities and constraints of civil society organizations to raise awareness regarding human rights violations. KEYWORDS: semantics of victimhood, politics of victimhood, victim organizations, vernacularization, Peru

The distributive dimension in transitional justice: reassessing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s ability to advance interracial reconciliation in South Africa

ABSTRACTThe South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has played a key role in advancing interracial reconciliation in South Africa, and has become a model to illustrate how transitional justice interventions can be used to heal divided societies and advance reconciliation. While acknowledging its achievements, this article emphasises the importance of socioeconomic justice to the TRC’s objectives, and critically assesses the adequacy of the TRC’s reparation programmes in addressing continuing structural and socioeconomic inequalities in the country. One overall weakness in the Commission’s work was its narrow mandate of investigating gross human rights violations, which meant the TRC contributed to exposing only some ‘truths’ while obscuring others. A detailed exploration of the TRC’s institutional mechanisms reveals that the Commission’s lack of focus on socio-economic justice has served to limit its overall contribution to reconciliation.

Conflict continues: Transitioning into a battle for property in Cambodia today

This article discusses the ongoing hybrid war crimes tribunal taking place in Cambodia — in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) — in relation to the simultaneous eviction of the Boeung Kak Lake community in the capital, Phnom Penh. Presenting these two phenomena alongside one another highlights the contradiction inherent in the liberal peace model's humanitarian rhetoric of societal reconstruction and its economic imperatives, which serve the interests of the elites. The material discussed here suggests that so-called transitional justice interventions may accompany a period of stabilisation, which is good for the global market, but do little to enhance fairness and peace for ordinary people.

Alex Batesmith, Improving the Effectiveness of International Lawyers in Rule of Law and Transitional Justice Projects

Improving personal effectiveness has been a popular subject for many decades in the business world. However, in transitional justice and rule of law, effectiveness has only relatively recently been a topic of interest, as researchers investigate reasons why international legal interventions succeed and why they fail. This paper examines the issue of effectiveness of rule of law and transitional justice interventions from the perspective of the actors themselves – the international lawyers – especially as they work with their national counterparts to achieve their objectives. The report analyses the barriers to intercultural effectiveness at the individual level for international lawyers. The main part of this paper then focuses on the specific knowledge, skills and values through which an international lawyer may be able to optimise their own intercultural effectiveness. In particular, we highlight the desirability of a full factual briefing before starting work in a different country, the need for effective intercultural communication and organisational skills and the importance of adopting a flexible attitude and an understanding of one’s personal and professional limitations. We will also discuss how institutions hiring international lawyers can take also concrete practical steps to improve the success of interventions, by helping their staff and consultants to become more interculturally effective.The methodology for this paper is qualitative and more than fifty lawyers with experience working in international interventions were surveyed for their personal reflections on effectiveness in their workplace. The author of the paper has also drawn on his own experiences and discussions with both international and national colleagues, having spent more than ten years working in the field of international criminal law, transitional justice and rule of law development.This report was commissioned as part of the Lawyers, Conflict & Transition project – a three-year initiative funded by the Economic & Social Research Council that is run in partnership between the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast and the Transitional Justice Institute.

The Bloody Sunday Inquiry:Transitional Justice and Postconflict Reconciliation in Northern Ireland

Recent research suggests that transitional justice interventions may be essential to advancing post-conflict reconciliation in societies that have been deeply divided by histories of gross human rights abuses. In Northern Ireland, a uniquely 'piecemeal' approach to the past emerged following the Belfast Agreement combining an array of discrete truth-recovery and justice initiatives to address the abuses of the Troubles. One of the most important of these interventions has been the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, which in June 2010, released a Final Report of its findings regarding the controversial shooting deaths of 14 civilians in Derry/Londonderry on January 30th, 1972. This article provides a qualitative assessment of the degree to which the Inquiry has been able to advance crucial aspects of truth and justice for the events of Bloody Sunday and explores how these efforts have contributed to ongoing processes of reconciliation between Catholic/nationalists and Protestant/unionist communities in Northern Ireland.

What is the Future of Transitional Justice?

This piece explores and critiques the project of transitional justice. It has been more than a quarter of a century since transitional justice burst onto the global stage. Over the years it has come to be billed as a panacea for addressing deeply embedded social and political dysfunction after periods of mass repression and violence. Many theorists and policy makers have argued that it is a key bridge to sustainable peace, democracy and human rights. But the historical record is not clear about a direct causal relationship between transitional justice mechanisms and specific outcomes in post-conflict societies. In some cases, truth commissions, criminal prosecutions and other transitional justice interventions appear to have given society a chance at a new and hopeful beginning. In others, conflicts have either re-emerged or been exacerbated. Which begs the question, is transitional justice the appropriate vehicle for achieving these goals? If it does not always lead to positive outcomes, why not? Are there conceptual problems and theoretical deficiencies in how we make sense of justice and transitions that account for the failures? Or is it the translation of transitional justice norms into practice that is wanting? The big question is this: Does transitional justice have a future, given its mixed record? This piece focuses on the meaning of the concept, how its application has evolved and whether it is sustainable as theory and praxis. How defined is the concept of transitional justice? What exactly does it entail and what does it seek to achieve? Are political democracy, the rule of law and human rights – the pivots of liberalism – the desired end results implicit in transitional justice approaches? If so, why should liberalism be the germ of the new post-conflict society? If transitional justice promotes liberalism, who gains and who loses if it succeeds? How would liberalism address deeply rooted cultural, colonial and ethnic rivalries and inequities? Would structures of deep inequity be vanquished by these norms? Or does this conception of transitional justice exacerbate conflicts as it seeks to transform societies? Who pays for transformation? What about market forces and norms – do they fuel or contain conflict? If existing transitional justice concepts are inadequate to recover, or reclaim, societies sickened by violence and repression, are there alternatives? If so, how do those alternatives compare with present conceptualizations of transitional justice? Should the term ‘transitional justice’ itself be abandoned?

The Omarska Memorial Project as an Example of How Transitional Justice Interventions Can Produce Hidden Harms

The Omarska Memorial Project as an Example of How Transitional Justice Interventions Can Produce Hidden Harms

Who wants to forgive and forget? Transitional justice preferences in postwar Burundi

While transitional justice interventions are common in current post-conflict transitions, recent surveys in such settings suggest that public opinions often vary in their levels of support for such policies. Understanding such opinions is crucial for designing post-conflict policies that properly reflect public interests. This study uses original survey data from Burundi to interpret public opinions toward transitional justice policies in a post-civil war context. The data reveal a great deal of wariness among Burundians toward punishing human rights offenders or seeking the truth about the past. Why would large numbers of those entitled to accountability and truth express a preference to ‘forgive and forget’? This question is addressed by focusing on two important features of post-conflict settings – namely (1) uncertainty about the potential for renewed violence and (2) intense competition over how the postwar balance of power should be institutionalized. Findings suggest that the latter feature is indeed crucial: deep partisan motivations associated primarily with ethnicity, and to a lesser extent region, are key determinants of expressed desires to forgive and forget. A reasonable interpretation is that a sense of political gain may compensate for debts owed due to past abuses and induce a preference to avoid the pursuit of truth or punishment lest the political gains somehow be threatened. The conclusion draws out implications for policy and further research.