Suchergebnisse

This chapter concludes the volume, drawing together its different theoretical and empirical chapters. It argues that there is merit in looking beyond paradigmatic transitional contexts, since such a focus allows transitional justice to become relevant for a variety of justice actors, enables a decolonization of the field, and offers a new perspective on what can be expected of transitional justice. To make this argument the chapter discusses five themes that surface in the empirical chapters describing when transitional justice travels to aparadigmatic cases: 1. Pluralism and the unsettled character of transitional justice. 2. The standardisation of localized justice initiatives. 3. Ongoing transitions. 4. Political will and legitimacy. 5. Bridging the divide between scholars and practitioners. These five themes help to understand the contemporary field of transitional justice as it has expanded from transitional to non-transitional, aparadigmatic contexts.

This chapter compares two attempts to apply transitional justice to Belgium: the special parliamentary commission established in 2020 to analyse Belgium's colonial past in the Great Lakes region; and the earlier process of designing an educational programme for dealing with societal polarization. The parliamentary commission was modelled on a truth commission, while the educational programme drew on experiences with using transitional justice tools in conflicted settings in the Global South. Where the first struggled with issues of representation and decoloniality, the second met with skepticism and rejection because transitional justice was understood to apply to the Global South. Inscribed in these responses to transitional justice were therefore the relationship between Belgium and its others in the Global South. The chapter demonstrates that in consolidated democracies engaging in transitional justice processes may challenge the legitimacy of existing state institutions and their associated narratives.

This chapter discusses what transitional justice can be in a non-transitioning context of internationalised civil war, such as Syria since 2011. It argues that the transitional justice paradigm and its toolkit has allowed Syrian and international justice actors to counter the pervasive defeatism about the pursuit of justice for Syrians. Even when the international justice architecture is impaired, justice actors can still develop concrete initiatives to overcome the accountability gap and make a tangible difference for victims. Drawing on reports by NGOs and interviews with individuals involved in the pursuit of accountability and justice, it describes the evolution of the initial transitional justice efforts and examines the intentions of justice actors who embraced the 'toolkit' as a means of closing the accountability gap, achieve recognition, and disrupt violent state practices. The chapter illustrates why justice actors are using the paradigm of transitional justice in cases where the state is not transitional.

Introduction: This introduction provides the rationale and theoretical anchoring for the volume and its focus on aparadigmatic cases. It argues that practice and scholarship in paradigmatic transitional justice contexts built a field that conceptualises the state as a partner in the transition. However, due to the field's expansion to aparadigmatic justice contexts, this assumption and its associated binary concepts cannot inform analysis. Instead, as demonstrated by the present volume, transitional justice in aparadigmatic contexts offer different intentions, responses, and experiences of transitional justice. Where the state is not a partner, it may ignore, refuse, resist, and fight, while giving way to other actors and justice articulations.
The chapter first conceptualizes transitional justice as the potential for recognition, accountability and disruption. The chapter then discusses the expansion and recent standardisation of the field, whereby transitional justice has become four specific types of mechanisms: trials, truth telling, reparation and institutional reform. Thereafter it analyses the problem of the state, particularly how the field has assumed a transitional state, a partnering state. In the next section it offers a typology of transitional justice contexts that cover both paradigmatic and aparadigmatic contexts and ranges from contexts of ongoing conflict to consolidated democracy in formerly imperial states. This range covers seven different types of transitional justice context organized on the basis of the status of its political authority. Lastly, it maps the volume's chapters onto the typology and briefly introduces each of them.