‘The Cooling of Hearts’: Community Truth-Telling in Northern Uganda

Recent national and international debates on truth and reconciliation in Uganda have emphasized the importance of incorporating local-level mechanisms into a national transitional justice strategy. The Juba Peace Talks represented an opportunity to develop and articulate sufficient and just alternatives and complementary mechanisms to the international criminal model. The most commonly debated mechanism is the Acholi process known as mato oput (drinking the bitter root), a restorative justice approach to murder. Drawing on 2 months of research in nine internally displaced persons’ camps in 2007, we examine local justice practices in the region of northern Uganda to consider their potential, promise and pitfalls to realizing a successful truth-telling process. We find that although local mechanisms could help facilitate reconciliation in the region, truth-telling is but one part of a conciliatory process complicated by a national context of fear and the complexity of the victim–perpetrator identity at the community level. These locally informed insights help move forward the debate on such mechanisms in Uganda and add useful insights into community processes in the field of transitional justice more generally.     

Reflections on Moral Accountability

As patron of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation(CSVR), I am both proud and excited that this organization hastaken the lead in initiating an international publication ontransitional justice in partnership with the Human Rights Centerat the University of California, Berkeley. By creating a spacefor dialogue and the sharing of knowledge and research, theInternational Journal of Transitional Justice will no doubtcontribute to the growth of the field of transitional justiceand to its ultimate     

Transitional Justice in Peacebuilding: Dynamics of Contestation in the DRC

ABSTRACT

This article examines the place of transitional justice in peacebuilding by exploring how domestic and international actors frame this relationship and how this, in turn, moulds dynamics of contestation around transitional justice. In the transitional justice literature, contestation is usually framed around an international–domestic dichotomy: transitional justice agendas promoted by external actors confront strategies of instrumental adaptation of transitional justice by domestic elites and the adoption of alternative transitional justice approaches by local actors. Based on an analysis of transitional justice policy-making in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this paper proposes that a more multifaceted reading of contestation to transitional justice is needed. In the DRC, both external and domestic actors variously acted as transitional justice promoters and resisters, and their positioning on transitional justice was strongly conditioned by their broader understandings of the nature of the conflict and transitional justice’s role in peacebuilding. It is therefore suggested that contestation of transitional justice does not necessarily reflect a rejection of international approaches to justice, but instead more broadly expresses a lack of agreement on what transitional justice is and what its goals are. The article thus contributes to a broader interrogation of how discourses about the meaning of transitional justice are constructed in practice.     

Mapping the Nexus of Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

This article explores the convergences and divergence between transitional justice and peacebuilding, by considering some of the recent developments in scholarship and practice. It examines the notion of ‘peace’ in transitional justice and the idea of ‘justice’ in peacebuilding. It highlights that transitional justice and peacebuilding often engage with similar or related ideas, though the scholarship in each field has developed largely in parallel to each other, and often without any significant engagement between the fields of inquiry. The article also notes that both fields share other commonalities, insofar as they often neglect questions of capital (political, social, economic) and at times, gender. It is suggested that trying to locate the nexus in the first place draws attention to where peace and justice have actually got to be produced in order for there not to be conflict and violence. This in turn demonstrates that locally, ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ do not always look like the ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ drawn up by international donors and peacebuilders; and, despite the ‘turn to the local’ in international relations, it is surprising just how many local and everyday dynamics are (dis)missed as sources of peace and justice, or potential avenues of addressing the past.     

Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding after Mass Violence

¹Since the end of the Cold War, the international communityhas become increasingly involved in peacebuilding and transitionaljustice after mass violence. This article uses lessons frompractical experience and theories of peacebuilding and transitionaljustice to develop a model of transformative justice that supportssustainable peacebuilding. This model is holistic and transdisciplinaryand proposes a focus on civil society participation in the designand implementation of transitional justice mechanisms. It requiresus to rethink our focus on ‘transition’ as an interimprocess that links the past and the future, and to shift itto ‘transformation,’ which implies long-term, sustainableprocesses embedded in society and adoption of psychosocial,political and economic, as well as legal, perspectives on justice.It also involves identifying, understanding and including, whereappropriate, the various cultural approaches to justice thatcoexist with the dominant western worldview and practice. Asyncretic approach to reconciling restorative and retributivejustice is proposed as a contribution to developing transformativejustice and sustainable peacebuilding. The development of thistransformative justice model is informed by field research conductedin Cambodia, Rwanda, East Timor and Sierra Leone on the viewsand experiences of conflict participants in relation to transitionaljustice and peacebuilding.     

Underenforcement and Intersectionality: Gendered Aspects of Transition for Women

The transitional justice field has generally been preoccupiedby ‘dealing with the past.’ Increasingly, it isalso understood as enabling conflicted or politically unstablesocieties to integrate liberal democratic norms into processesof state-building or regime reform. Building on previous work,this article asserts that transitional justice encompasses farmore in conceptual and policy terms. Two substantive arenashave generally been overlooked: underenforcement of change processeswith transformational effects for women and the applicationof intersectionality theory to the experiences of women in post-conflictsocieties. This article addresses those lacunae.     

Editorial Note

This is my first venture in helping to edit a journal, whichis a new area for me since my experience is mainly in the areaof judicial adjudication. I agreed to become involved not onlybecause the theme of this issue, namely, ‘Gender and TransitionalJustice’ is of particular relevance to international justicetoday, but also because the advent of the International CriminalCourt (ICC) has opened up new possibilities for the ventilationof alternative aspects of justice for victimised communitiesand experts working in the field. Over the course of the last13 years, as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunalfor Rwanda (ICTR) and now the ICC, I learned to listen to differentvoices, both within     

Transitional Justice and the Reform of History Education

Where does history education fit into transitional justice andhow can it contribute to the goals of transitional justice?The contemporary understanding of transitional justice has broadenedto encompass more than just prosecutions, reparations, preventingimpunity, and building rule of law. Transitional justice goalsnow extend to truth telling, restoring the dignity and preservingthe memory of victims, building peace, creating respect forhuman rights and democracy, and to reconciliation. Tools forachieving these goals now include truth commissions and commemorations.But this list has not until now included how the historicalnarrative of the group(s) involved in conflict must change asa part of transition; and education, while often invoked whenthe topic of ‘never again’ is raised, has been largelyabsent from the transitional justice discourse. Neither thelarger education system nor the teaching of history –both what is taught and how – has been considered by theinstitutions transitional justice has aimed to reform. Thisarticle considers why history education matters, what conditionscomplicate its reform and what recommendations can begin tobe offered with regard to the relationship between history educationand transitional justice.     

Does Feminism Need a Theory of Transitional Justice? An Introductory Essay

This essay surveys feminist scholarship and praxis on transitionaljustice, examining its ongoing contribution to the conceptualizationand design of transitional justice mechanisms. We examine someof the gender implications of a specifically ‘transitional’theory of justice. The essay concludes by proposing that feministtheory should focus on how transitional justice debates helpor hinder broader projects of securing material gains for womenthrough transition, rather than trying to fit a feminist notionof justice within transitional justice frameworks.     

Transitional Justice and Its Discontents: Socioeconomic Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Limits of International Intervention

ABSTRACT

The incorporation of socioeconomic concerns into transitional justice has traditionally, as a result of prevailing liberal notions about dealing with the past, been both conceptually and practically difficult. This article demonstrates and accounts for these difficulties through the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country which has been characterized by a complex transition process and a far-reaching international intervention, encompassing transitional justice and peacebuilding as well as political and economic reforms. Examining the limits of international intervention in Bosnia and the marginalization of socioeconomic justice issues, the article analyses the events surrounding the protests that broke out in February 2014, and the ensuing international engagement with the protest movement. Faced with a broad-based civic movement calling for socioeconomic justice, the international community struggled to understand its claims as justice issues, framing them instead as problems to be tackled through reforms aimed at completing Bosnia’s transition towards a market economy. The operation of peacebuilding and transitional justice within the limits of neoliberal transformation is thus instrumental in explaining how and why socioeconomic justice issues become marginalized, as well as accounting for the expression of popular discontent where justice becomes an object of contestation and external intervention.     

The Gender of Transitional Justice: Law, Sexual Violence and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

Recent efforts to develop and implement progressive models oftransitional justice have been significantly influenced by majordevelopments in the law concerning sexual violence in armedconflict. In particular, the International Criminal Tribunalfor the former Yugoslavia has pioneered accountability for sexualviolence against women in armed conflict. This article takesthe ICTY as a case study of how gender can structure the accountabilitymechanisms of transitional justice. The article analyses howlegal norms and practices instantiate and reiterate, ratherthan transform, existing hierarchical gender relations. It considersthe existing models of sexual violence as a criminal harm underinternational law, and then examines gendered patterns of legalpractice in ICTY prosecutions. To address this engendering oftransitional justice, the article produces a new model of theharm of sexual violence in conflict, suggests the developmentof a new international offence of sexual violence and generatesdifferent strategies for international prosecutions of sexualviolence.     

Providing justice and reconciliation: The criminal tribunals for Sierra Leone and Cambodia

The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) and the Extraordinary Chambers for Cambodia (ECC) represent a departure from the model established by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yygoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The SCSL and the ECC have often been referred to as “mixed” or “hybrid” tribunals in which there are significant domestic and international components. The tribunals include a combination of domestic and international judges, utilize domestic and international laws and are administered by a prosecutorial team composed of domestic and international lawyers. Many of these institutional changes have been brought about because of criticisms of the ICTY and the ICTR. The fundamental question of this article is whether these mixed tribunals are a more effective mechanism for providing justice and reconciliation than purely international solutions. This is an important question because both the international community and states are moving in the direction of mixed tribunals.     

Guilty Pleas in International Criminal Law: Constructing a Restorative Justice Approach, Nancy Amoury Combs

The field of transitional justice is entering a new phase bornof several decades of experience and a maturation of the practicaland theoretical engagement with the complex set of problemsinvolved in facing past atrocities. Guilty Pleas in InternationalCriminal Law: Constructing a Restorative Justice Approach focusesattention on the issue of guilty pleas in international criminallaw as an area of legal practice that merits additional attention,     

The Time That Was Broken, the Home That Was Razed: Deconstructing Slavenka Drakulic's Storytelling About Yugoslav War Crimes

¹In this article, I analyze the conceptualization of transitionaljustice underwriting Slavenka Drakuli's book, They Would NeverHurt a Fly, on the trials at the International Criminal Tribunalfor the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. I adopt a criticaland deconstructive strategy of interpretation that reveals Drakuli'sidea of ‘justice for the Balkans’ as not only internallyincoherent and fractured but also politically problematic. Iintroduce two concepts as central to Drakuli's storytellingabout transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia: (i) theidea of a ‘broken time’ and (ii) the idea of a ‘razedhome.’ I conclude that Drakuli's narratives of justiceare aimed at repairing broken time and rebuilding the razedhome in a way that reveals the author's redemptive, rather thanpolitical, thinking about transitional justice.     

Transitional Subjects: The Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration of Former Combatants in Colombia

A key component of peace processes and postconflict reconstructionis the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) ofex-combatants. DDR programs imply multiple transitions: fromthe combatants who lay down their weapons, to the governmentsthat seek an end to armed conflict, to the communities thatreceive – or reject – these demobilized fighters.At each level, these transitions imply a complex and dynamicequation between the demands of peace and the clamor for justice.And yet, traditional approaches to DDR have focused almost exclusivelyon military and security objectives, which in turn has resultedin these programs being developed in relative isolation fromthe growing field of transitional justice and its concerns withhistorical clarification, justice, reparations and reconciliation.The author draws upon research in Colombia, a case of greatinterest because the government is attempting to implement mechanismsof reparations and reconciliation in a ‘pre-postconflict’context, and to implement DDR on the terrain of transitionaljustice.     

Transitional Justice and ‘National Ownership’: An Assessment of the Institutional Development of the War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia and Herzegovina

In anticipation of its closure in 2014, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has begun to set out proposals for preserving and promoting its legacy of prosecuting persons responsible for violations of humanitarian law during the conflicts of the 1990s. A key aspect of this legacy has been to support the ‘national ownership’ of the justice systems in the former Yugoslavia that will continue to try war crimes cases in the years to come. This study explores the institutional development of the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (WCC) to national ownership. In particular, it considers three critical aspects of the WCC's functioning that highlight the challenges that it faces as a mechanism of transitional justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). These are the composition of prosecutors and judges, prosecutorial practices and outreach and communication activities. The article shows that the continued difficulties with these areas of legal practice figure as significant obstacles to the WCC's transition to full national ownership by both the legal professionals and local populace of BiH.     

A Model for Dealing with the Past in the Israeli Palestinian Context

This article explores the potential applicability of transitionaljustice ideas to the Israeli–Palestinian context. I arguethat given the particularities of the Israeli–Palestiniansetting, truth and reconciliation would be an essential componentof peacemaking even though this is an inter-societal conflictwhich will likely be resolved only through separation into twostates. Nevertheless, the interstate nature creates challengesto the application of common transitional justice mechanisms.In response to these challenges I offer a model based on anincremental process of narrow mechanisms throughout a long processof transition, rather than one high-profile all-encompassingmechanism in the post-conflict stage. I also suggest that inaddition to issues to be explored jointly by the two societies,such as refugees, prisoner release and compensation for victimsof violence, there could also be internal truth and reconciliationprocesses within each society. Finally, this model is premisedon an important role for civil society initiatives.     

Local Evaluations of Justice through Truth Telling in Sierra Leone: Postwar Needs and Transitional Justice

This article presents findings from a qualitative case study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in rural Sierra Leone. It adds to the sparse literature directly evaluating local experiences of transitional justice mechanisms. It investigates the conceptual foundations of retributive and restorative approaches to postwar justice, and describes the emerging alternative argument demanding attention be paid to economic, cultural, and social rights in such transitional situations. The article describes how justice is defined in Makeni, a town in Northern Sierra Leone, and shows that the TRC’s restorative approach was unable to generate a sense of postwar justice, and was, to many, experienced as a provocation. The conclusions support an alternative distributive conception of justice and show that local conception of rights, experiences of infringement and needs for redress, demand social, cultural, and economic considerations be taken seriously in transitional justice cases.     

Transitional Justice, Interdisciplinarity and the State of the 'Field' or 'Non-Field'

¹Transitional justice appears to be an established field ofscholarship connected to a field of practice on how to dealwith past human rights abuses in societies in transition. Theoriginal focus of transitional justice discourse was that humanrights law requires accountability in transitions, rooted inthe discipline of law. Over time, this focus has been expandedto include a much broader range of mechanisms, goals and inquiriesacross a range of disciplines. In order to probe the currentstate of the field, this article argues against the currentconception of transitional justice as a praxis-based interdisciplinaryfield. It suggests that there is a hidden politics to how transitionaljustice has been constructed as an interdisciplinary field thatobscures tensions between the range of practices and goals thatit now incorporates.     

The Priority of Legitimacy in Times of Political Transition

This paper interprets the relation between justice and legitimacy found in John Rawls's Political Liberalism and then applies it to the field of transitional justice. The author argues that transitional mechanisms can be better defended in terms of “legitimacy” than in “justice,” because the circumstances of transitional justice admit of reasonable disagreement over “just” public policy. In such circumstances, policy recommendations can always be construed as falling short of justice, thus raising plausible concerns over their normative justification. This paper attempts to answer such concerns by justifying transitional mechanisms as morally appropriate yet less than fully just. The author explains how the concept of legitimacy facilitates such a justification and how such a justification can secure the normative grounds that are ironically threatened by investigations relying on a concept of justice.