Transitional Justice Research Articles

Transitional justice for the “war on terror?”

More than 20 years after the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing “war on terror,” there is still very little comprehension of what its transitional justice implications might be. This article interrogates the transitional justice silence over the legacies of the war on terror as a way of problematizing both the war on terror and dominant liberal transitional justice paradigms. It charts how both paradigms have often failed to intersect, how some existing initiatives might nonetheless be understood as arising at their intersection, and the sort of questions that would need to be answered to frame a broad and ambitious transitional justice agenda to deal with the legacies of both terrorism and the response to it.

Special edition: chasing truth and (re)conciliation: navigating contexts, tensions, limits and possibilities “Reclaiming truth recovery against the backdrop of ongoing Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine”

PurposeThis article argues that truth recovery practices that take place against the backdrop of ongoing settler colonial erasure, as is the case when considering Zionist colonial violence in Palestine, must focus on combating state-sponsored attempts at erasure, rather than solely providing a platform for the expression of settler guilt.Design/methodology/approachThe article analyses existing literature on truth recovery practices that take place in Palestine, including the work of a variety of local NGOs engaged in such praxis, with a view to considering how this form of transitional justice has germinated incrementally in the space. Critical reflection on the work of a variety of grassroots NGOs is situated alongside other forms of transitional justice intervention.FindingsThe article argues that in the context of enduring settler colonialism, the truth regarding past Zionist atrocities in historic Palestine must avoid being curated in the present day in such a way as to allow for damage limitation rather than the platforming of conversations around meaningful repair. Truth recovery for recovery's sake serves only to reinforce the settler colonial status quo rather than properly agitate for a full decolonisation, one that demands and facilitates indigenous Palestinian return.Originality/valueThe article challenges prevailing notions of the role of truth recovery practices in spaces of enduring settler colonial value. It makes clear that the role of truth recovery interventions in sites where colonial violence endures must be to actively and meaningfully support activities that reinforce native identity, history and presence on the land. Moreover, by reference to existing grassroots attempts at truth recovery in Palestine, the article provides an original and clear argument that states it is simply not enough to platform the revelation of uncomfortable truths or to provide opportunities for settler violence of the past to be “confessed” in public if it is disassociated from challenging the present-day structures of ongoing oppression.

Considerations on Transitional Justice and the Defense of Human Rights in the Continuum of the Colombian Armed Conflict

Transitional justice according to international standards for the protection of human rights, must satisfy the demands of the victims regarding the rights to truth, justice, reparation, and measures of non-repetition. Nevertheless, as far as the Colombian case is concerned, the persistence of the armed conflict shows a tension between the defense of human rights and the imprecise outcome of the transitional justice process. For this reason, the main advances of the Special Tribunal for Peace are identified, noting among other things that fear and crime factors, as categories of analysis, have legitimized the attack against the "enemy", since the historicity of the armed conflict as a continuum.

Counter‐powers. The daily life of transitional justice: Women, songs and resistance in Bellavista, Bojayá

AbstractThis article reconstructs the lives of women under transitional justice by narrating their history in Bojayá, in the Colombian Pacific, where one hundred children and adults were killed in clashes between the FARC guerilla and the paramilitary in May 2002. The stories reveal how the women, through games, social construction of the territory, and alabaos (funeral dirges), construct a fundamental counter‐power through which to understand transitional justice. Using photographs of post‐conflict realities in Colombia and ethnographic work carried out since May 2016 in the area, we argue that these sub powers build a kind of infrapolitics that collaborates, challenges, and reconstructs the power of the State as a nodal agent of the “transition” in Colombia. In this sense, the women use and endure the suffering, their condition as victims, and the reality created for them by transitional justice, as a new means by which to bargain conditions of citizenship in precarious contexts.

Making Peace, Fighting Battles in Colombia: An Annotated Interview with Juanita Goebertus

ABSTRACT This interview article provides a glimpse behind the scenes of making peace and shows how the engagement of a peacemaker stretches beyond practicalities and the time–space of peace talks. Based on the Colombian case, it focuses on moments of decision-making, strategic and creative thinking, conceptual debates and adversarial politics that take place throughout a peacebuilding process. Juanita Goebertus’ reflections on gender, legitimacy, and transitional justice reveal that the horizon of peace is not only shaped by the power of law, norms, and institutions but by peacemakers’ own principles and the cultural and political battles they are driven to fight.

Mirroring Truths: How Liberal Democracies Are Challenging Their Foundational Narratives

Long-established liberal democracies with histories of settler colonialism—from the United States and Canada to Australia and Scandinavia—are beginning to explore their histories of violence and dispossession. This, in many ways, is long overdue, but the desire to come to terms with past injustices should not obscure the challenges that still stand in the way of any reasonable effort to do so. We argue that transitional justice can be applied to colonial history in liberal democracies, but there are major conceptual and practical obstacles that need to be overcome if this is to happen in meaningful ways. We explore three of these obstacles here that are particularly significant: the doctrine of intertemporal law, the unequal power balance between the Global North and the Global South, and national identity. If these are to be overcome, it is important to tie historical to present injustices and to incorporate, beyond violations of physical rights, violations of economic and social rights that are particularly relevant for understanding continuities between past and ongoing violations. These rights are commonly neglected even by states that recognize a broad set of liberal rights and have the capacity to ensure that they are realized, and represent a promising avenue for pursuing a truly inclusive, equitable, and universal understanding of justice.

Role of honor, dignity, and face values in transitional justice in postconflict cyprus.

Role of honor, dignity, and face values in transitional justice in postconflict cyprus.

Learning Injustice: Historical Memory of the Indonesian 1965 Genocide and Education to Young People

Abstract: When a state refuses to confront and resolve its burned history of past abuses by eliminating its unjust narratives and official history, how will the younger generation learn about its nation's dark past? This article attempts to answer this question by looking at several teaching initiatives that emphasize historical memory in Indonesia. The genocide against leftist groups that began in October 1965 is still being denied by the state, even though some elements of civil society, including victims' groups, have tried various efforts to ensure that the state can carry out the transitional justice agenda. By conducting interviews and direct observations, this paper finds some historical justice education initiatives carried out against young people by elements of civil society. This form of education is quite effective in critically building young people's historical understanding and their agency in the community.

Insights from Colombia: restorative transitional justice and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace

Insights from Colombia: restorative transitional justice and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace

Transitional justice and the media: a case study on the special jurisdiction for peace and the press in Colombia

Transitional justice applicable to the transition from dictatorships to democracies and from states of war to states of peace, supposes a very wide field of study, application and varied developments according to the transition scenarios. Its implementation under conditions of permanence of internal armed conflict and social and political cleavage, has led to divisions for or against it and for or against the armed actors in dispute in Colombia. These cleavages have been transferred to the media in the form of ideological positions, which construct truths that may or may not favor transitional justice. This article deals with transitional justice as a theoretical and political perspective, synthesizes the origin, development and characteristics of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, JEP in Colombia and presents the results of an investigation that seeks to identify the existence or not of a differential treatment by of the newspapers El Tiempo and El Espectador on the Transitional Justice Law in the case of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (2017), JEP applied to the FARC-EP guerrilla group in the framework of the Havana peace process signed in the year 2016.

GEÇMİŞLE YÜZLEŞMEK: AVRUPA BİRLİĞİ SÜRECİNDE ARNAVUTLUK ÖRNEĞİ

Post-communist countries’ processes on their way to the European Union (EU) have extensively proceeded simultaneously with their transition from communism to democracy. The regime change led to a process of “coming to terms with the past” in the sense that these countries took transitional justice measures for the crimes and practices of the former authoritarian regimes. In this regard, Albania is a case worth considering as a part of the current EU enlargement agenda. As a country that was not involved in the ethnic wars between the former Yugoslavian countries, Albania experienced a different historical pace of a communist past with its peculiarities. This article mainly aims to analyse Albania’s coming to terms with its communist past and thus the transitional justice measures implemented in its EU process. The main argument of the article is twofold: First, EU impact was limited when Albania started its transitional justice period in the 1990s. This was due to the fact that progress in the EU process of Albania in terms of EU candidacy was enhanced in the 2000s and the impact of the strict EU conditionality became evident in these years as well. Secondly, the current international circumstances, in which the rivalry between Russia as well as China, and the West is at its peak in the so-called Western Balkans region, could allow Albania to be more closely aligned with the EU, which in turn may provide the necessary conditions for deeper reforms to come to terms with its past.

Paradoxes of Human Rights

This paper examines mainstream human rights discourse and its failure in being upheld within society. The paper is analyzed through prominent political philosophers like Robert Meister, Costas Douzinas, and Hannah Arendt but with a greater emphasis on Meister's phenomena of Transitional Justice. This paper is divided into four sections where each political thinker provides their skepticism on human rights and ends off with its broader implication through current movements like Black Lives Matter.

Redressing displacement in Northern Ireland: Identity, land and dealing with the past

Northern Ireland has been an active site of transitional justice; however, the geographical and spatial implications of violence on housing, land and property issues have remained on the margins of academic, policy and practitioner attention. This is despite mass displacement and housing being key grievances at the outset of the conflict/Troubles in Northern Ireland. Nevertheless, this article explores the institutions and redress schemes brought in during the conflict to mitigate these violations, including the creation of an independent housing body the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. Paying particular attention to the impact of families and communities in rural and urban areas, the article finds that individualised redress processes during ongoing violence continues to replicate the long history of segregation and social mistrust. Moreover, redress offered tended to reinforce notions of loyalty to the state and underlined the difficulties of resolving housing and land issues during ongoing violence, which continues to reverberate during peacetime through continuing displacement and physical segregation.

Changing presents, shifting past(s): the diverse interests of transitional justice and cultural heritage in the case of the Iranian revolution

ABSTRACT Cultural heritage and transitional justice both seem to be established terms with fixed connotations: the former of universally valued and appreciated cultural objects and the latter of processes related to replacing a non-democratic regime with a democratic one. The social, political and legal realities of actual transitions and cultural objects caught in their midst, however, are much more complex. One such particular case was the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its immediate aftermath, which, despite being a distinct transition from one non-Western regime to another, encountered similar issues with regard to the preservation of cultural heritage objects linked to the former establishment. The purpose of this paper is thus to provide a better understanding of the non-traditional processes of transitional justice, with a special focus on the place of cultural heritage objects during a transition using the example of Iran.

Quantitative Methods, Transitional Justice, and Development: What are the Findings?

Quantitative Methods, Transitional Justice, and Development: What are the Findings?

Populism and transitional justice: talking the talk without walking the walk

Populism and transitional justice: talking the talk without walking the walk

Judging Genocide: Emotional Labor During Transitional Justice

Despite the proliferation of transitional justice, scholars have rarely researched the emotional toll on those who implement transitional justice mechanisms. This article accordingly examines the emotion management techniques employed by eighty-five judges who served in Rwanda’s post-genocide gacaca courts. Most of the intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion management strategies we find are gendered, with men generally emphasizing strength and women underscoring empathy and understanding. Moreover, the dimensions of identity that were most salient during the conflict also shaped the judges’ interpersonal emotion management strategies. Specifically, judges who were not targeted during the genocide focused on regulating emotions tied to punishing defendants, while judges who were targeted emphasized survivors’ emotional catharses. As such, our findings show how conflict divisions and gender norms structure the expression of emotion during transitional justice processes.

Documenting Disappearance

On August 12, 2022, Tamil relatives of those forcibly disappeared during the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983–2009) marked their 2,000th day of public protest. Since these roadside protests began, elderly women and men searching for their loved ones have passed away and transitional justice promises have failed, but the disappeared have not been found. This article examines archives of the disappeared: collections of files, objects, photographs, etc. about missing loved ones. Paradoxically, these archives, as evidence that the disappeared once lived, are at the core of the protests, yet they are still overlooked by the Sri Lankan state. I explore these collections by examining the intersection of critical personal archives, life writing scholarship, and South Asian studies. The emerging field of critical personal archives suits the unique quality of archives of disappearance, their constructed nature, and their underlying intimacy. Life writing scholarship focuses a much-needed critical lens on self-representation, power, and narrative in archives, especially regarding those whose stories are marginalized and/or not deemed archivable. Drawing on semi-structured interviews I carried out with mothers of the disappeared in 2016–2017 and 2022, I analyze these archives using three life writing concepts: relationality, cultural scripts, and autotopography. The result reaffirms the enduring cultural, political, and personal value of archives of the disappeared and calls for reimagining personal archives as politically and emotionally powerful forms of representation that carve space for love and resistance.

Evidence of Jorge

Jorge Soto Gallo disappeared on July 15, 1985, during a trip from Medellín to Bogotá in Colombia. Jorge is one of the thousands of disappeared people in Colombia whose families are still searching for answers, yet Jorge’s life and disappearance have been memorialized and recorded through his sister’s work of preserving, cultivating, and activating his personal archive. During recent decades, families of disappeared persons have begun to assemble folders that carry the evidence of disappearances. This article explores the personal archive of Jorge Soto Gallo with the aim of understanding a recordkeeping practice carried out by families and communities, which focuses on disappeared persons and often leads to a broad repertoire of political activism in defence of human rights. We ask, Which records are included, how are they brought together during these periods of upheaval, what do they mean, and what role do they play? We argue that creating and preserving these archives of enforced disappearance act as liberatory memory work (LMW) and as instincts of the families against forces of impunity and oblivion. We show that LMW is a living reality in Colombia that operates on a person-centred level, going beyond transitional justice frameworks, and turning victims into recordkeepers providing the possibility of historical accountability for future generations.

Transitional justice and online social platforms: Facebook and the Rohingya genocide

Abstract This article examines the complex role of social media platforms in transitional justice processes, with a particular focus on the challenges and impediments these platforms can present. Using the Rohingya genocide as a case study, we scrutinize the destructive impact that social media, especially Facebook, can have when misused for inciting hate speech and violence. Furthermore, the article delves into the governance mechanisms of social media platforms, shedding light on the failures that contributed to the genocide. In this exploration, we identify both internal and external governance mechanisms that faltered in their duty to protect human rights. The article also scrutinizes legal mechanisms available for bringing justice to genocide victims at both international and domestic levels. Ultimately, this article contributes to ongoing discussions about digital platform accountability, the intersection of human rights and online content moderation and the importance of rigorous platform governance in the context of transitional justice.