LOCALISED JUSTICE AND STRUCTURAL
TRANSFORMATION: HOW NEW
APPROACHES TO TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE
PULL IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
Padraig McAuliffe*
Abstract
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.
* Senior Lecturer, School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool, UK. My thanks to the
editors and anonymous reviewers for their suggestions.
Contact Padraig McAuliffe at p.g.mcauliffe@liverpool.ac.uk.
96 Intersentia