ABSTRACT The secret prison is the most enduring symbol of Morocco’s Years of Lead (1956–1999), a period of systematic state violence whose institutional reckoning remains incomplete. Survivors and their families have continuously demanded truth, justice, and accountability, yet these demands were only partially met by the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (ERC), established in 2004 and explicitly mandated to avoid prosecuting perpetrators, effectively producing a transitional justice process without perpetrators. In this article, I analyze Youssef Fadel’s novel A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me (2016) and draw on Michael Rothberg’s framework of the implicated subject to argue that the novel dismantles the myth of a perpetrator-less past by subordinating a focus on the sovereign to the complex inner lives of the prison guards themselves. Central to this argument is Baba Ali’s fractured identity, simultaneously a named guard wrestling with conscience and the anonymous functional cook, a duality that reveals how the carceral system demands psychological fragmentation from those it conscripts. I first examine how Benghazi’s compartmentalization sustains the carceral system, then analyze Baba Ali’s fractured identity and its moral consequences, and finally read the casbah as a technology of power whose complicity extends into the social fabric of Moroccan life.

Transitional justice has emerged as a cornerstone for addressing the legacies of armed conflict, promoting accountability, reconciliation, and institutional reform in post-conflict societies. Despite its widespread adoption, the effectiveness and limitations of these mechanisms remain unevenly understood in African contexts. This study examines transitional justice in Rwanda and Sierra Leone within the framework of Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG 16), focusing on how judicial and non-judicial processes contribute to durable peace and governance. The research is theoretically anchored in Liberal Peace Theory, which underscores the role of democratic governance, rule of law, and human rights in sustaining peace, and Institutional Governance Theory, which emphasizes the critical role of institutional capacity, legitimacy, and structural conditions in the successful implementation of justice initiatives. Using a qualitative case-study methodology, the study analyzes legal frameworks, regional and international instruments, and socio-political factors shaping transitional justice processes. Findings reveal that while transitional justice has advanced accountability, strengthened institutions, and facilitated reconciliation, its transformative potential is constrained by political interference, resource limitations, and uneven implementation. The study concludes that integrating transitional justice with broader governance, socio-economic, and institutional reforms is essential to achieving sustainable peace. By linking theory, practice, and SDG 16, this research contributes to a comprehensive understanding of transitional justice’s potential and limitations in African post-conflict settings.

ABSTRACT This article examines how the omission of queer experiences from Poland’s transitional justice processes after the fall of communism has contributed to ongoing systemic discrimination and state-sponsored homophobia. Using Operation Hyacinth – a nationwide police action in the 1980s that targeted homosexual men for registration and surveillance – as a case study, it investigates the absence of truth telling, reparations and institutional acknowledgement within post-1989 democratic reforms. The article conceptualizes this exclusion as an ‘anti-queer continuum,’ whereby failure to address past injustices facilitates their reproduction in contemporary Poland, visible in anti-LGBTQ+ political rhetoric, the establishment of ‘LGBT ideology-free zones’ and persistent legal inequalities. Drawing on queer and feminist critiques of transitional justice, a systematic literature review and existing empirical and archival studies, the article argues for a rethinking of transitional justice frameworks to include sexual and gender minorities. It concludes that without queering transitional justice, cycles of queer erasure and violence will persist under the guise of democratic governance.

ABSTRACT This article weaves together a transnational visual history of the use of herbicides in war. I trace the photographic analysis of herbicidal warfare as it was employed as a tactic of colonial repression, used against anti-colonial struggles, in counterinsurgency campaigns in the Cold War and, eventually, to Colombia in the War on Drugs. I argue that this mode of analysis was key to the design of ecocide. The goal of tracing these histories in relation to ecocide is to open up transitional justice processes and legal forums to include the natural world as a subject that has also experienced the violence of war. In doing so, I argue for the cultivation of an ‘earthly memory’ that can bear witness to the destruction of war and ecocide, thus articulating the deep connections between political and environmental violence.

Abstract Two narratives – of victimhood and perpetration – in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) go hand in hand. They overlap, blend, intertwine, and, as I will argue, deepen polarisation among and between the main ethnic groups, rather than help bridge the societal divide, which appears to be deeper than ever since the end of the armed conflict in 1995. In this essay, I will reflect on what I saw, felt, and heard during my regular visits to Banja Luka, my hometown and the administrative centre of Republika Srpska, Bih. I will use my latest visit as a backdrop to tell the broader story of fragile transitional justice processes in BiH, and beyond.

ABSTRACT Abolition feminism and transitional justice are two bodies of scholarship and practice which have rarely been in direct conversation with each other. This article attempts to bridge that gap by applying an abolitionist analysis to Guatemala’s near 30-year transitional justice process. I focus on the limits of the transitional justice process in Guatemala in addressing the depth of intergenerational harm of historic and ongoing colonialism in a heteropatriarchal and racially stratified state. Drawing from ethnographic research with the Centre for Training, Healing and Transpersonal Investigation – Q’anil – in Guatemala, I provide a practical example of what abolition feminists would call ‘life-affirming practices’ in the pursuit of healing and justice in the aftermath of conflict. I argue that abolition feminism may guide us towards alternative ways of understanding and doing justice in the aftermath of conflict and in response to the historic and ongoing harms of colonialism.

TRUTH & DARE: THE GAMBIA'S PATH TOWARDS ENHANCED IMPLEMENTATION OF LAWS AGAINST SEXUAL VIOLENCE

This article analyzes how the Argentine Transitional Justice Process (ATJP) enabled the judicial recognition of the Armenian Genocide through domestic mechanisms anchored in international human rights law. Argentina’s determination in the Armenian Genocide Truth Trial (2001–2011) constitutes the first and most rigorous judicial finding on the genocide by any national court, grounded not in memory politics or diplomatic pressures but in binding legal standards. The article examines how an Argentine federal chamber upheld the right to truth of a descendant of genocide survivors and applied the principle of inapplicability of statute of limitations to state-denied genocidal crimes, issuing an unprecedented ruling despite the absence of an accused before the court. This decision shows that when international or diplomatic routes are blocked, domestic courts can still give effect to international legal norms, especially when backed by sustained civil society engagement. The emphasis is on the transnational application of Argentine jurisprudence to historical atrocities, while selectively referencing Argentina’s broader experience in prosecuting crimes against humanity, including the 1985 Juntas Trial and the ESMA III-Death Flight Section Trial. The article asserts that Argentina’s definition of the right to truth as an independent legal obligation, conceptualized by Juan E. Méndez and implemented via truth trials, and the intertwined adoption of the five pillars of transitional justice mechanisms (truth justice reparations memory and guarantees of non-recurrence), provides a persuasive avenue for enhancing genocide recognition through legal innovation. The study posits that by positioning domestic adjudication as a venue for global norm creation, Argentina’s methodology bolsters the international human rights framework, challenges denialism, and underscores the legal importance of remembrance following mass atrocities.

This article examines genocide commemoration as symbolic reparation within Rwanda’s transitional justice process. It portrays Rwanda as a society between the moral collapse of its violent past and the ongoing pursuit of a just and reconciled future. Based on qualitative desk research, the study argues that while formal justice cannot restore lost lives, commemoration creates a liminal space where acknowledgment, truth-telling, repentance, and memorialization advance a holistic, multidimensional reconciliation process, repairing interpersonal, spiritual, and ecological relationships.

Transitional justice processes have paid scant attention to colonial injustices. Among the latter, crimes against the cultural heritage of colonized nations have gone particularly overlooked. The argument of former colonial powers is that although morally appalling, colonialism was not illegal according to the standards of the time. By challenging this argument, this article critically investigates the relation between international law and colonial injustices to suggest ways to address the crimes of the past and provide legal guidance during transitional justice processes. It argues that to engage with colonial injustices, transitional justice should embrace a decolonized approach to Eurocentric international law and take into consideration alternative legal frameworks including both interpolity law and the legal resistance of the colonized nations. Received: 22 May 2025; Accepted: 05 December 2025

This paper explores the role of bioethics in addressing the specific challenges faced by LGBTQI+ victims in Colombia's transitional justice process. It argues that queer and feminist bioethics offer both theoretical and practical contributions to the core aims of truth, reparation, and non-repetition by critically engaging with the biomedical discourses at the base of prejudice-based violence. The pathologization of sexual and gender diversity is examined as a structural condition of victimization and re-victimization during and after the armed conflict. Drawing on reports, testimonies, and conceptual frameworks, the paper reflects on how bioethical perspectives can support recognition, dignity, and structural transformation. Rather than advancing prescriptive solutions, the analysis emphasizes the need for ongoing critical engagement with the medical, legal, and social imaginaries that sustain inequality. The article positions bioethics as a field capable of contributing to transitional justice by fostering reflection on difference, responsibility, and the epistemic dimensions of reparation.

Among the many crimes committed during the Tigray war from 2020 to 2022, the systematic destruction of health care has been extensively documented and contributed to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Despite the direct harm that Tigray's health care workers experienced and their role in sustaining care under siege, these professionals have been excluded from a transitional justice process that remains performative rather than substantive. We argue that this exclusion represents a violation of international legal obligations and a failure of both the Ethiopian government and the multilateral organizations involved through financing and diplomacy. Despite their marginalization, Tigrayan health workers have continued to exercise agency through sustained grassroots advocacy, documentation, and collective action. In this case study, we amplify the voices of these professionals as they assert their rights, record unacknowledged harms, and demand meaningful participation in the very mechanisms intended to deliver justice. Their experience demonstrates that truly centering victims requires centering health workers as well-addressing their material, legal, and psychological needs as part of any effort to uphold health as a human right.

PS 3: Conflict and Peacebuilding - Sultan Barakat and Irene Zaddach, Auditorium A & B (Rectory), September 4, 2025, 09:00 - 10:00The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has resulted in one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with over 12.7 million people affected, including 3.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs), 6.9 million displaced abroad, and 4.1 million returnees. The civilian toll is severe, with more than 40,000 casualties and extensive damage to critical infrastructure, including over 1,300 medical facilities and 721 educational institutions. These disruptions have led to widespread mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) needs, particularly among IDPs, persons with disabilities, women, and the unemployed, who are at heightened risk of depression and related conditions.The International Organization for Migration (IOM) MHPSS programme in Ukraine operates across the humanitarian-development nexus and integrates its activities into recovery and peacebuilding frameworks. The rationale for integrating MHPSS into peace and recovery is grounded in evidence that conflict and displacement profoundly affect psychosocial well-being at both individual and community levels. Unaddressed MHPSS needs impede recovery, social cohesion, and long-term peaceful coexistence. IOM’s approach prioritizes restoring agency, dignity, and belonging, fostering social cohesion and trust, and encouraging inclusive identity and solidarity across diverse groups.IOM employs a multi-model strategy, combining psychosocial and?socioecological models with a multilayered intervention approach. This spans basic services, community and family supports, focused supports, and specialized mental health care, ensuring comprehensive coverage. The programme is evidence-based and community-rooted, with needs assessments conducted locally and tailored responses addressing newly emerged vulnerabilities, such as support for people after amputation and innovative interventions like equine-assisted psychosocial support for veterans and their families.Further, IOM integrates MHPSS with livelihood support, life skills training, and transitional justice processes, aiming for community empowerment, sustainability, and the rebuilding of trust in institutions. The multiprofessional and multisectoral approach underscores IOM’s commitment to resilience, recovery, and sustainable peace in Ukraine.

Among the many crimes committed during the Tigray war from 2020 to 2022, the systematic destruction of health care has been extensively documented and contributed to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Despite the direct harm that Tigray’s health care workers experienced and their role in sustaining care under siege, these professionals have been excluded from a transitional justice process that remains performative rather than substantive. We argue that this exclusion represents a violation of international legal obligations and a failure of both the Ethiopian government and the multilateral organizations involved through financing and diplomacy. Despite their marginalization, Tigrayan health workers have continued to exercise agency through sustained grassroots advocacy, documentation, and collective action. In this case study, we amplify the voices of these professionals as they assert their rights, record unacknowledged harms, and demand meaningful participation in the very mechanisms intended to deliver justice. Their experience demonstrates that truly centering victims requires centering health workers as well—addressing their material, legal, and psychological needs as part of any effort to uphold health as a human right.

Bridging the gap with restorative justice responses to abuses in organisations: lessons from the Canadian Residential School’s transitional justice process Restorative justice and transitional justice are increasingly recognized as complementary approaches. While they have traditionally operated in different domains, restorative justice at the interpersonal and transitional justice in post-conflict or large-scale human rights violation contexts, their integration offers promising pathways for more holistic justice processes. This article contributes to the broader debate on their synergies by focusing specifically on the context of abuses in organisations. These abuses often reflect systemic and enduring patterns of harm that affect large numbers of victims, requiring justice responses that address not only micro-level interpersonal healing but also macro-level structural transformation. This makes it a particularly interesting context for examining how restorative and transitional justice can intersect. Using the Canadian case of residential schools as an example, the article explores how transitional justice practices and frameworks such as acknowledgement, truth-seeking, (symbolic) reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition, can deepen and extend restorative justice practices in institutional settings.

This article analyzes the crucial role played by courts with the function of judicial oversight in transitional justice processes. It examines how these judicial bodies act as guarantors of the human rights of victims, ensuring that proceedings are conducted fairly, impartial and transparently. Furthermore, it explores the challenges these courts in complex and polarized contexts, as well as the strategies they can adopt to overcome such difficulties and contribute to the construction of lasting peace. The research concludes that the court with the function of judicial oversight plays an essential role in the protecting human rights and building effective transitional justice by acting as a guardian of legality and a guarantor of procedural impartiality. Additionally, it was found that the existence of these court is fundamental to ensuring the credibility and legitimacy of the transitional justice processes. For the development of this article, precise diagnostic instruments were employed, which provided a clearer understanding during the research process and the achievement of the initially proposed and the achievement of the initially proposed objectives. Data were collected through a descriptive research approach, resulting in a well-structured and well-argued document aimed at clarifying doubts related to the subject under study.

Abstract Transitional justice (TJ) emerged during the consolidation of the liberal international order (the LIO). It was deemed to flow from, and contribute to, the emergence of democracy, human rights and the rule of law in post-authoritarian and post-conflict states. The LIO generated material and discursive support for processes of accountability, truth, repair and guarantees of non-repetition. The LIO is now widely perceived to be under significant threat with the rise of authoritarian states (most notably China and a revanchist Russia) and the erosion of liberal democratic values in the US and Europe. Some worry that TJ may have peaked and is doomed to decline in this more challenging ecology. This article is an attempt to show how the material and discursive environments of TJ have altered with the decline of the LIO and the rise of a multipolar world. In material terms, there are fewer democratic transitions that might facilitate the type of state-level rule of law or rights-promoting impact associated with accountability, truth or reparation processes, while liberal peacebuilding is now far less premised on democratisation and human rights that post-conflict TJ processes built upon. In a world where authoritarian rejections of human rights and the rule of law meet widespread support and where a chastened liberal West resiles from effectively exporting or supporting norms like TJ, there is also a lowering of the argumentative burden for those who want to outright defy, water down or find workarounds for TJ.

ABSTRACT Transitional justice and peacebuilding practitioners increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled digital tools to carry out investigative tasks. However, claims that AI tools offer transformative solutions for accountability and truth-seeking processes necessitate a greater attentiveness on the part of scholars and practitioners to their impact on investigations. A post-digital perspective provides an analytical lens to better understand how AI-enabled digital investigations intersect with transitional justice and pluriversal peacebuilding processes. The question this article responds to is: how do AI-enabled investigative tools impact upon the practice of accountability and truth-seeking missions? To respond to this question, this article explores post-Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) Iraq where a post-conflict investigative mechanism pioneered the use of AI-enabled investigative tools. This article concludes that overemphasising the promise of AI risks obscuring significant political and social obstacles to peacebuilding through universalising assumptions about the impact of technology.

This study analyzes the effectiveness of implementing restorative justice in resolving social conflicts within Indonesian communities as part of the transitional justice process. Using a qualitative approach and a case study method in several regions such as Poso, North Maluku, and West Sumatra this research explores how restorative mechanisms rooted in local wisdom can restore social relations, strengthen community cohesion, and prevent recurring conflicts. The findings reveal that restorative justice approaches are effective in fostering reconciliation at the community level through dialogue, acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and traditional symbolic acts. However, their effectiveness largely depends on institutional support, facilitator capacity, and the alignment of public policies. The integration of local values such as musyawarah (deliberation), pela gandong, and alek nagari emerges as a key factor in sustaining the peacebuilding process. These findings emphasize the importance of strengthening the national legal framework, engaging civil society, and enhancing the capacity of local actors so that restorative justice can function not only as a conflict resolution mechanism but also as a means of achieving long-term social transformation

ABSTRACT Background. The study explores the key role of the media in the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms, using the example of two different but comparable countries—Ukraine and Taiwan. Both countries have undergone large-scale political transformations: Taiwan from authoritarian control by the Kuomintang party to democratic governance, and Ukraine as a post-Soviet state in a state of armed conflict and simultaneously rethinking its totalitarian past. In both contexts, the media act not only as a channel of information but also as a tool for influencing public opinion, shaping national memory, legitimizing legal processes, and ensuring open dialogue. The objective of this study is to identify similarities and differences in the functioning of the media in transitional justice processes in Ukraine and Taiwan, as well as to determine how they contribute to the achievement of its main objectives: establishing the truth, providing reparations, bringing the perpetrators to justice, and promoting reconciliation. Methods. The methodology of this study is based on an interdisciplinary approach that includes comparative legal analysis of normative acts, content analysis of media publications, a review of scientific literature, and doctrinal studies of the role of the media in legal discourse. The empirical basis consists of official documents, court practice, media materials, and public statements by representatives of transitional justice institutions in each country. Results and conclusions. This study highlights the dual nature of the media: on the one hand, they can support processes of reconciliation and public reappraisal of the past; on the other hand, they can become a source of polarization through political bias or the spread of disinformation. In Taiwan, the media actively covered the activities of the Transitional Justice Commission, promoted the memory of the repressed, and created space for public discussion. In Ukraine, the media operates in the context of ongoing war, focusing on documenting war crimes, exposing disinformation, and mobilizing national resistance. The study's conclusions emphasize that successful transitional justice is impossible without the participation of independent and professional media. Taiwan's experience can be useful for Ukraine in terms of memorialization, archiving crimes, public apologies, and supporting victims' rights. At the same time, Ukraine's practice of countering hybrid warfare, especially in the field of information security, is valuable for Taiwan and other states experiencing pressure from authoritarian regimes.