At Justice Visions we do research on topics related to the role of victims-survivors as protagonists in driving a wide range of justice struggles in the broad realm of transitional justice. This includes ‘textbook’ transitional justice contexts like Guatemala or Chile, but also contexts where the language and tools of transitional justice are mobilized in struggles over redress for colonial harm, contexts of ongoing conflict, or so-called entrenched transitions.
As such, we work both in contexts where formal transitional justice processes have been installed (typically after popular demands by those who experienced harm) that have sought to involve victims of large scale rights violations in their work, as well as in contexts where there has been no political transition and no formal transitional justice process, but where victims are the ones pushing for some form of justice and use the language and logic of transitional justice in the activism.
A central question underlying our various research lines relates to the added value of transitional justice for a wide range of justice struggles that deal with a broad range of injustices, and how this mobilization of transitional justice language and practice alters the dynamics and stakes of justice actors.
Across the various contexts in which we have worked, questions regarding the agency of victims have been a driving force shaping our research agenda. Our ambition is to further a practice-based re-appraisal of the language and tools of transitional justice. This is a language that continues to appeal to a wide range of justice actors worldwide – in spite of many critiques and concerns that have been voiced about the paradigm.
Through a sound empirical analysis of grassroots practices, innovations and ambitions, we engage in an exercise of rethinking and futureproofing the current transitional justice architecture to align it with the contexts in which it is being used.
Through our podcast, media interventions, presentations, publications and fieldwork, we seek to disseminate findings among academic as well as broader audiences.
Our research seeks to push the academic and policy debate about victims-survivors-protagonists’s roles in driving (transitional) justice processes in new directions and to provide practitioners and policy-makers with empirically supported insights.
The Justice Visions Research Group is based at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University.
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 2023000901), and the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO G062924N). We have also received funding from the Fulbright Foundation, Ghent University and the Faculty of Law and Criminology.
This project was formulated on the basis of broad consultations with various stakeholders, and stakeholders have been crucial drivers and interlocutors at important decision-points throughout the life-cycle of the project. It is our aim to carry out our work in ways that are as relevant as possible for academics, practitioners, policy-makers, and victims-protagonists themselves. In addition to academic output, we engage in a broad range of outreach activities, from public speaking and the organization of round tables and lectures, to the production of a podcast series and policy briefs. If you have any advice, suggestions or questions about this, we’d love to hear from you! Don’t hesitate to reach out to us via the contact form on this site or directly to one of the researchers.
