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
108
Language
English
Court
Reference
P. KAAPAMA, “The Enduring Colonial Legacies of Land Dispossessions and the Evolving Property Rights Legal Discourses: Whither Transitional Justice?”, HRILD 2017, nr. 1, 108-119
Recapitulation
The previously formally colonised communities and people in different corners of the world continue to grapple with the far-reaching effects and deep historical scars inflicted at the height of the era of Western colonial expansion. Through the lenses of the evolving legal discourses on property rights in land, this article problematises transitional justice (TJ) as an emerging interdisciplinary field that has appropriated for itself the normative aim of achieving justice for the victims of violence in its various forms. Based on Johan Galtung’s notion of the violence triangle, it explores the rather complex and mutually reinforcing interrelationships between evolving legal discourses on property rights in land on the one hand, and the transmutation of the enduring colonial legacies of land dispossession on the other. It concludes by advocating a broadening of the conceptual parameters of mainstream TJ thinking beyond the narrow confines of Western and legalistic notions of property rights. The process of transforming entrenched histories of violence requires the imagining of what can be rather than holding onto what has been. As an emerging and distinct academic discipline, TJ therefore holds tremendous prospects for further growth and influence, as well as for fulfilling its normative aims, provided it is willing to do more in the direction of embracing alternative indigenous values and norms from those communities in whose enduring historical hardships it claims to have an interest.
