Engendering Transitional Justice: a Transformative Approach to Building Peace and Attaining Human Rights for Women

In this article, we examine the continuity of harms and traumas experienced by women before, during and after war and other mass violence. We focus on women because of the particular challenges they face in accessing justice due to patriarchal structures and ongoing discrimination in the political, economic and social, as well as legal spheres, and because of the gendered nature of the crimes and harms they experience. We use the four key pillars of transitional justice identified by the United Nations as a framework to analyse how these harms are addressed in the context of criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations and institutional reform. We conclude that a gender-transformative approach to transitional justice that focuses on transforming psychosocial, socioeconomic and political power relations in society is needed in order to attain human rights for women and build a sustainable peace.     

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.     

Gendered Justice Gaps in Bosnia–Herzegovina

A gendered reading of the liberal peacebuilding and transitional justice project in Bosnia–Herzegovina raises critical questions concerning the quality of the peace one hopes to achieve in transitional societies. By focusing on three-gendered justice gaps—the accountability, acknowledgement, and reparations gaps—this article examines structural constraints for women to engage in shaping and implementing transitional justice, and unmasks transitional justice as a site for the long-term construction of the gendered post-conflict order. Thus, the gendered dynamics of peacebuilding and transitional justice have produced a post-conflict order characterized by gendered peace and justice gaps. Yet, we conclude that women are doing justice within the Bosnian–Herzegovina transitional justice project, and that their presence and participation is complex, multilayered, and constrained yet critical.     

Peace and Justice through a Feminist Lens: Gender Justice and the Women’s Court for the Former Yugoslavia

ABSTRACT

Post-conflict interventions to ‘deal with’ violent pasts have moved from exception to global norm. Early efforts to achieve peace and justice were critiqued as ‘gender-blind’—for failing to address sexual and gender-based violence, and neglecting the gender-specific interests and needs of women in transitional settings. The advent of UN Security Council resolutions on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ provided a key policy framework for integrating both women and gender issues into transitional justice processes and mechanisms. Despite this, gender justice and equality in (post-)conflict settings remain largely unachieved. This article explores efforts to attain gender-just peace in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It critically examines the significance of a recent ‘bottom-up’ truth-telling project—the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia—as a locally engaged approach to achieving justice and redress for women impacted by armed conflict. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with women activists, the article evaluates the successes and shortcomings of responding to gendered forms of wartime violence through truth-telling. Extending Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the article advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognizing women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialize before, during, and after conflict.     

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.     

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.     

Gendered Narratives: Stories and Silences in Transitional Justice

Stories told about violence, trauma, and loss inform knowledge of post-conflict societies. Stories have a context which is part of the story-teller’s life narrative. Reasons for silences are varied. This article affirms the importance of telling and listening to stories and notes the significance of silences within transitional justice’s narratives. It does this in three ways. First, it outlines a critical narrative theory of transitional justice which confirms the importance of narrative agency in telling or withholding stories. Relatedly, it affirms the importance of story-telling as a way to explain differentiated gender requirements within transitional justice processes. Second, it examines gendered differences in the ways that women are silenced by shame, choose silence to retain self-respect, use silence as a strategy of survival, or an agential act. Third, it argues that compassionate listening requires gender-sensitive responses that recognize the narrator’s sense of self and needs.     

There Is a Crack in Everything: Problematising Masculinities,Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice

The study of masculinity, particularly in peacebuilding and transitional justice contexts, is gradually emerging. The article outlines three fissures evident in the embryonic scholarship, that is the privileging of direct violence and its limited focus, the continuities and discontinuities in militarised violence into peace time, and the tensions between new (less violent) masculinities and wider inclusive social change. The article argues for the importance of making visible the tensions between different masculinities and how masculinities are deeply entangled with systems of power and post-conflict social, political and economic outcomes. An analysis of masculine power within and between the structures aimed at building the peace in societies moving out of violence is considered essential. The article argues for an analysis that moves beyond a preoccupation with preventing violent masculinities from manifesting through the actions of individuals to considering how hidden masculine cultures operate within a variety of hierarchies and social spaces.     

Structural Violence,Socioeconomic Rights,and Transformative Justice

This article provides a critique of the scope of existing models of transitional justice, which focus on legal and quasi-legal remedies for a narrow set of civil and political rights violations. The article highlights the significance of structural violence in producing and reproducing violations of human rights, particularly of socioeconomic rights. There is a need to utilize a different toolkit and a different understanding of human rights from that typically employed in transitional justice in order to remedy structural violations of human rights. Focusing on a case study of land inequalities in postapartheid South Africa, the potential for transformative (rather than transitional) justice in postconflict and postauthoritarian contexts is discussed. The article outlines a definition of transformative justice, relevant actors, and relationships for such an agenda and discusses the kinds of strategies that promise a more transformative approach.     

Contested Governance: Understanding Justice Interventions in Post-Qadhafi Libya

ABSTRACT

This contribution reflects upon the nexus between transitional justice and peacebuilding through a study of how transitional justice practices in post-Qadhafi Libya interacted with broader efforts to establish governance institutions in the aftermath of Libya’s 2011 armed conflict. It argues that dominant practices of transitional justice, promoted by external actors, prescribed narrow state-centric justice interventions that were ill-suited for a polity in which the state was highly contested. In fact, transitional justice proved divisive in Libya because attempts to project state-centric liberal justice practices were limited by their targeting of weak institutions that lacked local legitimacy and their inability to reconcile alternative normative frameworks that challenge the modern state. In addition, the weakness of Libya’s state institutions allowed thuwwar, or revolutionary armed groups, to dictate an exclusionary form of justice known as political isolation. Drawn from fieldwork conducted in Libya, this contribution provides lessons for both peacebuilding and transitional justice practice that call for a rethinking of teleological notions of transition and greater engagement with notions and concepts that fall outside dominant practices.     

Editorial Note

Scholarly interest in the field of transitional justice is growingrapidly. At the March 2008 meeting of the International StudiesAssociation, a world-wide organization of some 4,000 membersfounded to promote research and education in international affairs,there were multiple panels on transitional justice with topicsthat ranged from evaluations of transitional justice mechanismsto the impact of the International Criminal Court, and fromculture and transitional justice to its psychological impact– and these were only in the sessions that were devotedspecifically to the field. Other sessions addressed preventionof genocide, conflict resolution and international law –all of which can be examined through the lens of transitionaljustice as well. As we have noted in earlier editorials, thechallenges and limitations of the field are discussed at meetingsof political     

Empirical Research and the Development and Assessment of Transitional Justice Mechanisms

In this paper, we demonstrate different methods of empiricalresearch available to transitional justice practitioners andscholars. Guidelines on how to conduct research in the fieldof transitional justice are outlined on the basis of the principlesof monitoring and evaluation for decision making, program developmentand policy development. We argue that such methods offer policymakers a systematic way to consult a population and constructa comprehensive view of what this population has experienced(e.g., violations), what they know (e.g., knowledge of varioustransitional justice mechanisms), what they believe in (e.g.,definition of justice) or what they need (e.g., accountability).Such knowledge is essential for developing effective evidence-basedtransitional justice programs.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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 Injustice: Subverting Justice in Transition and Postconflict Societies

Diverse in many respects, one unifying element of research on transitional justice (TJ) concerns the fact that predicted outcomes of these processes are normatively appealing; specifically, advocates argue TJ promotes truth and reconciliation, prevents armed conflict and increases democratization. This perspective further assumes that justice efforts are implemented with these goals in mind. We argue that it is possible for governments to implement TJ without maintaining an interest in truth, peace, or democracy but rather with the intention of promoting denial and forgetting, perpetuating violence, and legitimating authoritarianism—a process we call transitional injustice. In this article, we provide indicators by which scholars and policy makers can determine if transitional injustice is taking place. To further our argument, we conduct a detailed examination of Rwandan politics following the violence of 1994 and demonstrate the ways in which the Rwandan state has been able to use justice processes towards alternative ends.     

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, 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.