A decade of critical transitional justice scholarship may create an impression of a field in crisis. Yet, transitional justice practice seems to be thriving: transitional justice language and initiatives are travelling to increasingly diverse contexts, which are often very different from those in which transitional justice emerged. Examples are initiatives to address ongoing conflict or historical injustice. The manifestations of transitional justice in these contemporary ‘aparadigmatic’ cases are often so distinct that they challenge the foundation of the paradigm. Notably the innovations, ambitions, and experimentation happening in these cases invite for a rethinking of transitional justice’s standard mechanisms and objectives, which currently revolve around the pillars of justice, truth, reparation, non-recurrence and memorialisation.
This project goes beyond definitional debates over whether these processes are ‘real’ instances of transitional justice. Instead, the project examines how properly theorizing the innovations happening in these contemporary cases is can help to close the emerging gap between theory and practice, and how it can even be a way to address some of the most pressing critiques of standardized forms of transitional justice.
The project will use a mixed-method actor-oriented approach to analyse the practices and ambitions of grassroots justice actors in 6 contemporrary transitional justice cases. This analysis foregrounds documentation initiatives because there is significant innovation happening in this realm, and because documentation’s central role across all transitional justice initiatives means that this innovation has the potential to amend the entire paradigm.
We adopt an eco-systemic analytical framework to examine how (innovations in) documentary practices interact with and affect other (transitional) justice initiatives. The ambition is to build on this empirical analysis to reconstruct the transitional justice paradigm from the ground up and to arrive at a practice-informed and future-oriented transitional justice paradigm.
This project is funded through an ERC Consolidator Grant (Tine Destrooper, 101171170).
