Tine Destrooper

Short Bio

Tine Destrooper is the director of Justice Visions and a professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University. She is also a member of the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University.

Her research focuses on victim engagement in transitional justice. She currently carries out a cross-case analysis of the role of documentation in transitional justice. She is also the coordinator of a cross-institutional project on future-proofing human rights accountability, and is engaged in various case studies regarding transitional justice in aparadigmatic contexts.

Her research has been supported by three European Research Council grants (Starting Grant 804515, Consolidator Grant 101171170, Proof of Concept 101212937), as well as several grants by the Flemish Foundation for Scientific Research and the Special Research Fund of Ghent University.

In 2023 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to undertake research at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, and currently she is Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow at the Institut d’Études Avancées in Paris.

Prior to this, she held academic positions at various European and American institutions, including Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2016-2017), New York University’s Law School (2015-2016), the Universities of Antwerp and Leuven (2013-2015), Leiden University (2012-2013), and the European University Institute (2008-2012). Here she conducted research on the consequences of violent conflict and the role of civil society in dealing with the aftermath of violent conflict.

She is currently a member of the Flemish Young Academy, an advisory board member of the Hannah Arendt Institute, a member of the Research Council (Ghent University), and the co-chair of the Human Rights Research Network (Ghent University).

She is also a co-editor of the Journal of Human Rights Practice (Oxford University Press).

Before joining Ghent University, she was the managing director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice in at New York University, where she gained experience in managing and publishing policy-oriented research, and where she worked together with researchers, civil society organisations and policymakers at various levels; and the director of the Flemish Peace Institute – an independent research centre with the Flemish Parliament.

Education

University Degrees

• PhD Social and Political Science (European University Institute)
• MRes Social and Political Sciences (European University Institute)
• MA Politics, Security and Integration (University College London)
• BA Political Science (Leuven University)

Past and current professional positions

• Associate Professor Transitional Justice, Human Rights Centre, Ghent University (since October 2018)
• Director Flemish Peace Institute (Jan 2018 – March 2019)
• Research Fellow, Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice, Law School, New York University, United States (Jan 2015 – Aug 2017)
• Research Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany (Sep 2016 – Jul 2017)
• Director, Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice, Law School, New York University, United States (Jul 2015 – Jun 2016)
• University Lecturer, Antwerp Centre for Institutions and Multilevel Politics, Faculty of Social and Political Science, University of Antwerp, Belgium (Sep 2013 – Jun 2015, part time)
• Post-Doctoral Researcher, Law and Development Research Group, Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp, Belgium (2014)
• Post-Doctoral Researcher, School for Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University, the Netherlands (Dec 2012 – Dec 2013)

Recent publications

• Destrooper, Tine. 2024. “Contextualizing the absence of standardized approaches to transitional justice in The Philippines.” International Journal of Law in Context.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. “Divergent ambitions. Bracketing off the disruptive potential of transitional justice in Belgium.” In Transitional Justice in Aparadigmatic Contexts. Accountability, Recognition, and Disruption, edited by Tine Destrooper, Line Engbo Gissel and Kerstin Bree Carlson, 142-160. New York and London: Routledge.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. “Disruptive accountability? Temporal regimes and social change in decolonization struggles in Belgium.” Journal of Law and Society 50 (1):59-76. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12410.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. “Literary accountability and the future of human rights protection.” Law, Culture and the Humanities OnlineFirst. doi: 10.1177/17438721231174791.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. “Remembering Martial Law. An eco-system of truth initiatives and the emergence of narrative documentation in the Philippines.” International Journal of Transitional Justice.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. “Disruptive Reparations? Tunisia’s Victim Regions and the Collective Reparations Dilemma in Transitional Societies.” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development OnlineFirst. doi: 10.1177/15423166231154253.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. “Understanding the Unforeseen Consequences of an Incomplete Transitional Justice Ecology in the Philippines.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 42 (2):1-22. doi: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/18681034231186632.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. ““The Truthfulness Lies in the Process, Not the Outcome”. Using Artistic Practices to Further Truth-Telling and Memorialization in the Philippines.” Social Sciences 12 (9):516.
• Verclyte, Sofie, and Tine Destrooper. 2023. “Stitching the rights narrative. How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice ” PoLAR – Journal of Political and Legal Anthropology.
• Kerremans, Sarah, and Tine Destrooper. 2023. “Exploring the nexus between transitional justice and the resolution of eco-territorial conflict. Time for an eco-systemic turn in transformative transitional justice?” International Journal of Transitional Justice OnlineFirst.
• Destrooper, Tine, Line Engbo Gissel, and Kerstin Bree Carlson, eds. 2023. Transitional Justice in Aparadigmatic Contexts. Accountability, Recognition, and Disruption. London and New York: Routledge.
• Destrooper, Tine, and Par Engstrom. 2023. “Concluding remarks.” In Transitional Justice in Aparadigmatic Contexts. Accountability, Recognition, and Disruption, edited by Tine Destrooper, Line Engbo Gissel and Kerstin Bree Carlson, 219-230. New York and London: Routledge.
• Destrooper, Tine, Kerstin Bree Carlson, and Line Engbo Gissel. 2023. “Introduction: Transitional Justice in Aparadigmatic Contexts.” In Innovation and consolidation in transitional justice. Learning from aparadigmatic contexts, edited by Tine Destrooper, Line Engbo Gissel and Kerstin Bree Carlson, 1-21. New York and London: Routledge.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. “Mapping the unforeseen consequences of an incomplete transitional justice ecology in the Philippines.” Contemporary South-East Asian Affairs.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2023. “Transformative justice and the need for a multi-dimensional understanding of impact.” In Transitional justice and impact, edited by Susanne Karstedt and Chrisje Brants. London: Routledge.
• Robins, Simon, and Tine Destrooper. 2022. “Conclusion.” In Transitional Justice in Tunisia: Innovations, Continuities, Challenges., edited by Simon Robins, Paul Gready and Sherif Mohyeldeen. London and New York: Routledge.
• Herremans, Brigitte, and Tine Destrooper. 2022. “Moving beyond formal truth practices and forensic truth in the Syrian conflict. How informal truth practices contribute to thicker understandings of truth.” Social & Legal Studies.
• Destrooper, Tine, and Cira Pallí-Asperó. 2022. “Historical truth and accountability in the post-colonial state.” Leuven TJ Blog. https://blog.associatie.kuleuven.be/ltjb/historical-truth-and-accountability-in-the-post-colonial-state/.
• Destrooper, Tine, and Safa Belghith. 2022. “Overlooking women’s lived realities. How Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission dealt with the hijab ban.” In Transitional Justice in Tunisia: Innovations, Continuities, Challenges, edited by Simon Robins and Paul Gready. London: Routledge.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2022. “Belgium’s “truth commission” on its overseas colonial legacy. An expressivist analysis of transitional justice in consolidated democracies.” Journal of Human Rights OnlineFirst. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2022.2042220.
• Herremans, Brigitte, and Tine Destrooper. 2021. “Stirring the Justice Imagination: Countering the Invisibilization and Erasure of Syrian Victims’ Justice Narratives.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 15 (3):576-595. doi: 10.1093/ijtj/ijab025.
• Evrard, Elke, Gretel Mejía Bonifazi, and Tine Destrooper. 2021. “The Meaning of Participation in Transitional Justice: A Conceptual Proposal for Empirical Analysis.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 15 (2):428-447. doi: 10.1093/ijtj/ijab013.
• Destrooper, Tine, and Sofie Verclyte. 2021. “Artistic practices as a site of human rights. How performative ethnography can facilitate a deeper contextual understanding.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 13 (3).
  Destrooper, Tine. 2021. “The intuitive appeal of learning from the past to alter the present.” Jewish Historical Studies 52 (1).
• De Haan, Marit, and Tine Destrooper. 2021. “Using restorative justice to rethink the temporality of transition in Chile.” International journal of restorative justice (2):206-228.
• Destrooper, Tine, and Brigitte Herremans. 2020. “Hoop omarmen en verbeelden.” Karakter 70:3-10.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2020. “The travel, translation and transformation of human rights norms.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization, edited by Esperanza Bielsa Mialet and Dionysios Kapsakis. London: Routledge.
• Destrooper, Tine, and Sally Merry. 2019. “Contemporary Transformations Seen in the Use of Human Rights.” Harvard Health and Human Rights Journal.
• Destrooper, Tine. 2019. “On travel, translation and transformation.” In Human Rights Transformation in Practice, edited by Tine Destrooper and Sally Merry. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press.
• Destrooper, Tine, and Sally Merry, eds. 2018. Human Rights Transformation in Practice. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press.