The question of how to serve justice, facilitate peaceful transitions and empower victims of past large-scale abuses is about as old as the field of transitional justice itself. For the past two decades, practitioners have been turning to participatory approaches as a promising way to make advances regarding each of these issues. An oft-cited benefit of victim participation in transitional justice processes has been that it allegedly increases the legitimacy of these processes by rendering them more locally relevant and that this empowers participants and turns them into ambassadors of the justice process.
However, victim participation in formal transitional justice processes has also been heavily critiqued and little is known about how to organize this participation in practice or under which conditions alleged benefits (for individual victims-participants or for society at large) are likely to materialize, or even how to mitigate the potential negative effects of participation in these often highly formalized processes, or how these formal processes may interact with bottom-up initiatives.
Because both formal and informal transitional justice processes often face significant practical, financial and political constraints, it is crucial to better understand how participatory approaches can be developed in ways that contribute to a positive and lasting legacy, especially in a world where a vast number of societies is emerging from violent conflict, and where failure to engender durable justice and peace may lead to more instability and ultimately violence.
This project engages in a systematic empirical analysis of the scope, nature, and role of victim participation in transitional justice processes, and establishes a framework for conceptualizing victim participation across formal and informal realms in ways that acknowledge the agency of victims and that contribute to transitional justice’s goal of engendering just, stable and secure societies.
A multi-disciplinary approach, rooted in legal studies, social psychology, political science, public administration, and anthropology is used, which allows for a multi-dimensional understanding of these issues, both in academic and in practical terms. The research findings from this project provide policy-makers with empirically supported expertise on pressing policy issues, and, because of the project’s attention to international institutions as well as local contexts, findings can enrich our scholarly understanding of the interaction between these policy levels and apply to many post-conflict settings worldwide.
This project is now nearing completion and has been funded through an ERC Starting Grant (Tine Destrooper, 804151).
