Podcasts

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.

The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this third episode of the miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization and documentation efforts in Afghanistan, and reflect on the merits of arts-based approaches, as well as the challenges posed by such approaches.

Sophia Bijleveld Milosevic is a member of AHRDO, an Afghan human rights organization that uses a transformative, victim-oriented approach. Their work aims to document human rights violations for judicial purposes while also telling victims’ stories in a way that reflects their lived experiences, among others via art-based approaches. Through the Memory Box initiative, AHRDO collected over 15.000 personal items of war victims, creating a space for individual and collective memorialization in Afghanistan. “We felt it was important to continue to share these testimonies and to continue to advocate for victims”, states Sophia. “In the Afghan context, memorialization can be considered as a form of symbolic reparation and a way of acknowledging the stories of the victims.” To leverage their expertise in documentation, and launch an online platform, AHRDO partnered with HURIDOCS.

HURIDOCS is an organization specializing in archival and documentation practices in the domain of human Rights. Its documentalist, Bono Olgado talks about how the victim-centred and arts-based practices of AHRDO challenged his organization to revisit its existing archival practice, and how memory and memorialization are understood. “When we are talking about creating a platform or a database that would reflect these art-based approaches, then we would need a different form of expertise, which is quite challenging because we’re technically creating counter-epistemologies to existing practises of documentation.” Initiatives such as the Memory Box and art-based methodologies, Bono stresses, reconfigure our understanding of documentation and data. “The challenge is to design technologies that actually support this new set of methodologies as opposed to flattening them.”

Benedict Salazar Olgado (Bono) is an archivist, scholar, and community organizer, working at the intersections of documentation, technology, and human rights in the Global South. He is the senior documentalist at HURIDOCS, assisting human rights groups with their documentation and technological needs. Bono is also an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies, teaching archival theory and practice. He received his PhD in Informatics with a Global Studies emphasis from the University of California, Irvine, and an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. His current research focuses on the datafication of memory politics in TJ.

Sophia Milosevic Bijleveld leads the Memorialization and Transitional Justice Program at the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organisation. Formerly the Global Networks Program Director at the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, she has extensive experience with cultural heritage and transitional justice initiatives in Switzerland, Afghanistan, Rwanda, and Kenya. With a PhD in political science, her research explores the political use of cultural heritage and the dynamics of memory politics in post-conflict settings. Dr. Milosevic Bijleveld’s work includes numerous publications on memorialization’s role in transitional justice.