In contexts where no formal transitional justice mechanisms exist, grassroots actors often develop alternative ways of documenting harm, making claims for justice and keeping demands for accountability alive. Türkiye offers an important setting for examining these dynamics. While there is no formal political transition or state-led transitional justice process, the country has a long history of civil society-led documentation and justice-seeking, including in relation to state violence, enforced disappearances and ongoing forms of structural harm.
This research project examines how women’s organizations in Türkiye document femicide and articulate justice claims in a context of democratic backsliding. It asks how these documentation practices and justice claims can speak to current critiques of transitional justice, particularly debates on aparadigmatic contexts, state-centric models of justice, documentation from below and the marginalization of gender-based violence within the field.
This research explores what becomes visible when femicide documentation is examined through a transitional justice lens, and what these practices may reveal about the scope and limits of transitional justice itself. In doing so, the research focuses on how women’s organizations frame femicide, why they engage in documentation, how they understand the relationship between documentation and justice, and how their practices may align with, diverge from or reconfigure dominant assumptions within transitional justice scholarship.
The project draws on feminist, actor-oriented and ecosystemic approaches to transitional justice. It understands women’s organizations not only as advocacy actors, but also as producers of knowledge, memory and justice claims in a context where ordinary justice mechanisms often fail to address femicide as a structural and political problem. Through qualitative research, including document analysis and semi-structured interviews with women’s organizations and other relevant actors, the project examines documentation as a practice through which justice is imagined and pursued from below.
This case study contributes to the ERC-funded GROUNDOC project’s broader objective of tracing how grassroots actors innovate documentation practices in settings that fall outside the conventional boundaries of transitional justice. By focusing on women’s organizations documenting femicide in Türkiye, the research seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on what transitional justice can mean beyond formal political transitions.
Photo: Mert Kahveci / Unsplash
