Rethinking transitional justice on the basis of grassroots practices
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For many years, both scholars and practitioners have grown increasingly skeptical of what transitional justice is, what it can do, and how it has been implemented in practice. Critiques of standardized transitional justice interventions include the lack of attention for structural change, exclusionary and restrictive avenues for the participation of those who experienced violence, limited regard for pre-existing or grassroots justice initiatives, and overall a track record that is said to be ambiguous at least.
Yet, in practice, an increasingly wide range of – grassroots – justice actors in mobilizing the language and tools of transitional justice across an equally wide range of justice struggles. This includes struggles for justice directly linked to a political transition in the recent or distant past, but also struggles for eco-territorial rights, struggles for decolonization and and repair for ongoing colonial harm, struggles over memory in contexts of ongoing conflict, to name only a few. This suggests that transitional justice continues to hold great appeal for those most affected by violence.
This is what inspires us to seek for ways to rethink, improve and expand what transitional justice is or can be, by studying the variety of initiatives that grassroots and other justice actors are developing under the banner of transitional justice.
How can their concrete practice respond to current critiques and help to contextualize and futureproof the practice of transitional justice?
Our work has been funded through three different grants by the European Research Council (Victpart 804154, Groundoc 101171170, and RedressHub 101212937), as well as several major grants by the Special Research Fund (iBOF/21/031 Futureproofing Human Rights), the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA 945408), and the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO G062924N), as well as several smaller grants by the Fulbright Foundation, Ghent University and the Faulty of Law and Criminology.
