Volume 11 : 1
Editorial: Critical Issues in Transitional Justice – A Sisyphean Exercise
Examining the Criticisms Levelled against Transitional Justice: Towards an Understanding of the State of the Field
After Things Fall Apart: Challenges for Transitional Justice Futures
Failing Victims? The Limits of Transitional Justice in Addressing the Needs of Victims of Violations
Reparations in Transitional Justice: Justice or Political Compromise?
Rethinking Post-Truth Commissions: Empowering Local Capacities to Shape the Post-Truth Commission Discourse
The Socialisation of Transitional Justice: Expanding Justice Theories within the Field
Localised Justice and Structural Transformation: How New Approaches to Transitional Justice Pull in Different Directions
The Enduring Colonial Legacies of Land Dispossessions and the Evolving Property Rights Legal Discourses: Whither Transitional Justice?
Editorial: Critical Issues in Transitional Justice – A Sisyphean Exercise
Examining the Criticisms Levelled against Transitional Justice: Towards an Understanding of the State of the Field
After Things Fall Apart: Challenges for Transitional Justice Futures
Failing Victims? The Limits of Transitional Justice in Addressing the Needs of Victims of Violations
Reparations in Transitional Justice: Justice or Political Compromise?
Rethinking Post-Truth Commissions: Empowering Local Capacities to Shape the Post-Truth Commission Discourse
The Socialisation of Transitional Justice: Expanding Justice Theories within the Field
Localised Justice and Structural Transformation: How New Approaches to Transitional Justice Pull in Different Directions
The Enduring Colonial Legacies of Land Dispossessions and the Evolving Property Rights Legal Discourses: Whither Transitional Justice?
Year
2017
Volume
11
Number
1
Page
96
Language
English
Court
Reference
P. MCAULIFFE, “Localised Justice and Structural Transformation: How New Approaches to Transitional Justice Pull in Different Directions”, HRILD 2017, nr. 1, 96-107
Recapitulation
In the last decade, a sharply critical turn in transitional justice (TJ) has rejected its traditional legalist preoccupations with liberal normative goods such as civil and political rights, the rule of law and democratisation to advocate a more transformative and culturally-relevant practice. Two alternative avenues are usually proposed. The first approach is one of transformative TJ that addresses structural inequality by advocating national projects like distributive programmes, affirmative action and welfare delivery. The second conception emphasises local agency and the needs of communities by fostering local healing projects and incorporating customary or traditional justice processes in the expectation of fostering interpersonal reconciliation. These new avenues for TJ are usually welcomed as cumulative, as opposed to alternative, projects. There is an explicit assumption that large-scale welfare and public service-driven models and models organised around community or customary forms of justice are mutually reinforcing. What has gone unrecognised is that these alternative orientations for TJ pull in very different directions. The economic transformation model is inspired by socialist models that places the state at the centre of economic justice guarantees, while what has been labelled as the ‘local turn’ speaks in the language of micro-level conflict resolution and community empowerment premised on distance from the state. This article explores the implied but strikingly under-analysed assumption that localised frameworks of justice and macro-level frameworks of structural justice are naturally reinforcing. It surveys the possibility that relationist, non-linear discourses of local justice can depoliticise structural injustice by assuming ‘responsibilised’ communities can self-help to change their circumstances of poverty and inequality, downplaying necessary institutional and macro-economic reform.
