Podcasts

In this special episode of Justice Visions, we shift our typical focus on innovations in transitional justice to a broader debate about international law, its shortcomings, and how to rethink it in ways that benefit victim-survivors of gross human rights violations. We do so on the occasion of the inaugural Lecture of the Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University, which this year was given by Palestinian-American human rights attorney, legal scholar, and activist Noura Erakat. The Chair is awarded to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the field of human rights.

In an interview which took place just before the lecture, Brigitte Herremans talks with Noura about the limits and possibilities of international law amid unfolding atrocities in Gaza. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law, Noura argues that, though not neutral and biased against those most in need of protection, can still be repurposed by those mobilizing it to resist injustices. While Noura’s work and activism focus on Gaza, her arguments about the possibilities and challenges of International Law are relevant to a broad range of  TJ practitioners and scholars who are working in contexts of ongoing conflicts and entrenched accountability crises. It offers critical insights about how legal tools can be reclaimed in transnational struggles, rethinking justice beyond formal mechanisms.

Touching on survivor-led agency, Noura challenges the framing of Palestinians as passive victim-survivors. Instead, she insists on recognizing their active role in resisting domination and their capacity to demonstrate the full spectrum of their potential as humans, despite the genocide and complicity of states in the Global North. For Noura, part of the Palestinian victory lies not only in the struggle for liberation, but in living that liberation, through joy, care, and collective action. As she states: “We are not defined by what Israel does to us. We are defined by who we are. We are defined by what we do, what we produce, what we write, how we love one another…. We are defined by who we are, despite that harm, and how we respond to it.”

Throughout the conversation, Noura emphasizes the importance of counter-hegemonic knowledge production and the need to resist dominant legal and media frameworks as these continue to erase Palestinian experiences and perspectives. She calls for a decolonial and feminist understanding of justice, and resistance that connects Palestine to global struggles. She also reminds us of the responsibility that comes with activism. “If Palestinians who have been placed in a cage and basically shot at with the most advanced weapons technology is a form of experimentation and without mercy have not given up. What right do I have to give up?”

Dr. Noura Erakat is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University whose work lies at the intersection of law, activism, and scholarship. Her acclaimed book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine offers an analysis of how international law has been used and manipulated in the context of Palestine. Her research spans humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory.

Picture demonstration Brussels ©Tineke Dhaese

This new episode zooms in on the invisibilization of certain voices in transitional justice discourse and practice, namely LGBTQIA+ and children’s perspectives, whose lives and experiences have been excluded from most formal and informal transitional justice initiatives.

Our guests, Pascha Bueno-Hansen and Caitlin Biddolph, both conduct research on transitional justice issues from LGBTQIA+, intersectional and decolonial perspectives. Pascha, associate professor at the University of Delaware, works on LGBTQIA+ mobilization and resistance in defense of human rights in Latin America. Caitlin, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, spoke about one strand of her research that focuses on queering childhood in global transitional justice governance.

Both scholars touch upon how LGBTQIA +, intersectional, and decolonial approaches help problematize and unsettle some of the current assumptions and challenges in transitional justice.

Pascha foregrounds that both the gender and sex binary, as well as the temporally bounded nature of transitional justice, limit our understanding of structural and historical violence against certain populations. This is clear for example, in the erasure of the lived experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community from transitional justice initiatives. Caitlin focuses on the paternalistic and protectionist nature of global transitional justice governance that tends to depict (queer) children as passive victims stripping their agency away and thus reproducing power hierarchies.

They both see opportunities in local intergenerational spaces to dismantle these discourses and practices. Through examples from Latin America, Pascha reflects how artivism paved the way to include LGBTQIA+ issues in transitional justice mechanisms. She also stresses how “younger generations have done such an incredible job of making inroads into inclusive language and preferred gender pronouns. And that is something that the older generations struggle with comprehending”.

Intergenerational dialogues can make global transitional justice more inclusive; Caitlin emphasizes too. She sees this as an opportunity to “stitching together stories across temporalities… of trying to put together the fabric of a country so that we have a more rich and ongoing narrative about injustice and violence and atrocity”. In her view, this has the potential of destabilizing power hierarchies present in global transitional justice institutions and turn them into dialogical and relational processes.

Researchers who are interested in this issue, might want to look into the call to contribute to a special issue by the International Journal of Transitional Justice on “Dissident Genders, Sexualities and Transitional Justice”.

Caitlin Biddolph is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Caitlin’s primary research focuses on queering global governance, international law, and transitional justice. Her doctoral research explored discourses and logics of gender, sexuality, civilisation, and violence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Caitlin is currently researching the global governance of transitional justice through queer decolonial perspectives. Caitlin’s most recent work has been published in International Journal of Transitional Justice, International Studies Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and European Journal of Politics and Gender. Her monograph, Queering Governance and International Law, is out in March 2025 with Oxford University Press.

In this new episode we zoom in on an oft-overlooked dimension of victim participation in formal transitional justice processes, namely the labor that victims invest in justice processes.

In a conversation with professor Leila Ulrich, we explore the intricate relationship between the ICC’s engagement with victims and the global capitalist systems in which the court operates. The dynamics of under-valorization of victims time-investment, the offloading of care work to local and gendered practitioners, and the invisibilization of victims’ contributions to formal justice processes characterize many international justice processes, Leila argues.

Therefore, it is crucial to acknowledge and make this work politically visible as labor. Foregrounding the knowledge, resources, and time people dedicate allows us to acknowledge their contributions and better understand the depth of their involvement.

“[T]here is a lot of tension between those who work and those who don’t work in the same way that there’s a lot of tension between those who are recognised as victims and those who are not. So there’s a lot of complexities and paradoxes involved in how victim participation functions.”

In this new episode, Tine Destrooper is joined by co-host Kim Baudewijns, who recently became part of the Justice Visions team, doing research on TJ processes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kim’s work situates this conversation in the broader landscape of  justice initiatives: standardized and informal, local and international, judicial and non-judicial, etc. This inspires a reflection on how victims’ roles alter across these various justice sites.

Dr. Leila Ullrich is an Associate Professor in Criminology at the Centre for Criminology at Oxford University, Leila works at the crossroads of international criminal justice, transitional justice, and victimology. She recently published the book, Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court: The Blame Cascade, which draws on fieldwork in Kenya and Uganda.

We kick off this new season of the Justice Visions podcast with a set of conversations that we initiated during the recent Justice Visions Conference, exploring victim participation, mobilization, and resistance within the realm of transitional justice. In this first episode of these miniseries, we shed light on victims driving transitional justice efforts in Turkey and Tunisia.

Our guests, Dr. Sélima Kebaili and Dr. Güneş Daşlı, both focus in their research on women survivors in contexts of conflict. Sélima, a senior lecturer at the University of Geneva, touches on the marginalization of female survivors in the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission and how survivors sought to overcome this. Güneş, a research fellow at Loughborough University, speaks of the mobilization of members of the Saturday Mothers who seek justice for enforced disappearances and crimes committed by Turkish state forces and paramilitaries.

Both scholars unpack the nuances of labels such as “leaders” and “victims”. Sélima explains that while “victim leadership” might make sense in terms of underlining the important role victims play in driving transitional justice efforts, we have to be mindful of the label when applying it in the context of movements, as it runs the risk of defining certain victims as leaders and pushing others into more passive identities. Many women assert their agency beyond the public realm, and a discourse of leadership may render their actions invisible.

Güneş points to the ways in which in Turkey survivors and family members use the labels of victim and survivor flexibly and how they navigate multiple identities. Starting their justice activism as relatives of the disappeared, they often evolve into human rights defenders, political actors, or lawyers, embracing multiple roles that sustain their resistance and resilience.

In both cases, acknowledging a diversity of experiences, identities and approaches is crucial, since rebuilding identities after extreme violence is a very delicate process. As Sélima notes, “It doesn’t always require a grand gesture, and often it unfolds through more modest everyday forms of reparation, like returning to work, reconnecting with others, and restoring a social life.”

In the absence of an official transitional justice process in Turkey, groups like the Saturday Mothers have for nearly 30 years led informal efforts for legal accountability, memory work, and truth recovery. Güneş emphasizes that victims maintain a long-term perspective and are not dissuaded by the apparent lack of hope: “We know that there is no hope now, but we continue. We are going to archive. We are going to focus on what we do now. But when the time comes, we are going to act.”

Dr. Sélima Kebaïli is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Geneva (Institute for gender studies), where she teaches classes on gender and postcolonial studies. Her research focuses on development, gender, transitional justice, political violence and victimhood, mainly in the MENA region and Europe. She has degrees in political science from the UMontreal and in gender studies from the EHESS (Paris), and received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the EHESS in 2021. Using a qualitative approach and a multisite ethnography with both international organizations and victims, she explores the shaping of female victims’ status and subjectivity with regard to political violence in transitional and post-conflict contexts.

Dr. Güneş Daşlı is a Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations, Politics, and History at Loughborough University. She earned her PhD from Jena University, Germany, in 2023. Her research focuses on post-conflict studies, critical justice theories, feminist moral philosophy, and social movements, with a particular emphasis on the Middle East. Dr. Daşlı has consulted on various research projects related to transitional processes, including recent efforts in Iraq. She teaches courses on conflict, gender and peace, and transitional justice. An active feminist peace advocate, Dr. Daşlı was part of the consulting team during Turkey’s Peace Process from 2013 to 2015.