At Justice Visions, we study how victims and survivors act as protagonists in struggles for justice after large-scale conflict and rights violations. This includes classic transitional justice settings like Guatemala or Chile, but also contexts where transitional justice’s language and tools are mobilized in other contexts: struggles for redress for colonial harm, ongoing conflicts, or so-called entrenched transitions where no clean political break has occurred.
We work both in contexts where formal transitional justice processes have been installed (typically after sustained pressure from those who experienced harm), as well as in contexts where there has been no recent political transition and no formal transitional justice process, but where victims themselves are borrowing the language and logic of transitional justice to press their claims.
A question runs through all of our research: what does transitional justice actually add to these different justice struggles, and how does invoking it change the stakes and dynamics for the people driving it? Across every context we’ve studied, victims’ agency keeps surfacing as the real engine of the field – which is why our ambition is a practice-based rethinking of transitional justice’s language and tools, which continue to be considered relevant by grassroots justice actors globally, despite the many critiques leveled at it over the years.
Grounded in the empirical study of grassroots practices, innovations, and ambitions, our research seeks to both critique and futureproof the transitional justice architecture, bringing it closer to the realities of the people actually using it.
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-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.
