Publicaties

In the Philippines, governmental and civil society actors installed a range of mechanisms to deal with violent legacies of the Marcos regime. Formal truth-telling mechanisms were, however, not part of the early transitional justice architecture, meaning that truth-seeking initially took place as part of other justice efforts. Nonetheless, more recently, a boom in truth, documentation and memorialization processes has resulted in a dynamic ...

To address the legacies of colonialism, several former colonial states have implemented a range of initiatives commonly considered to belong to the domain of transitional justice (TJ). These contexts are, however, very different from those for which TJ was initially conceptualized. As such, the implementation of elements from the TJ toolbox in these decolonization struggles raises several questions, which this article seeks to address. One of ...

Truth is a central concept in the struggle for justice for Syrians. Many justice actors have turned to the tools and rhetoric of transitional justice to further the quest for justice and truth. Yet, while doing so has allowed them to generate some international attention for victims, the transitional justice paradigm has several pitfalls. For one, the dominant understanding of truth and truth-seeking embraced in formal mechanisms tends to be ...

Human rights can be seen as a means to improve people's lived realities. Yet the language and practice of human rights are not always moored in these realities. What happens to the meaning of human rights when these are expressed in (partly non-verbal) ways that are deeply rooted in lived—embodied, material, and cultural—realities, and how does that practice transform ideas about rights? In this article, we describe how women from Syrian refugee ...

The Philippines have never known a unified state-sanctioned narrative about the violence that happened during the Marcos dictatorship. In order to resist ongoing disinformation campaigns that seek to erase evidence and memories of past violence, various institutional and civil society actors are currently initiating interventions in the domain of truth and memorialization. Notably, artists, curators, and creative professionals are engaging in ...

In the past decade, an encompassing transitional justice process has been developed in Tunisia, which interacts with various other policy domains, including that of development. This article foregrounds three important interrelated innovations of Tunisia's transitional justice process: the explicit attention for economic crimes and violations of economic, social and cultural rights; the introduction of the notion of victim regions; and the ...

In the summer of 2020, the Belgian Parliament established a Special Parliamentary Commission tasked with launching an enquiry into Belgium's overseas colonial legacy and reflecting on appropriate reparations. It was the first consolidated democracy to establish a truth commission to investigate the historical and ongoing injustices related to overseas colonialism. In this article, I argue in favor of treating this commission as a truth ...

This article explores the nexus between ecoterritorial conflict resolution and transformative transitional justice, against the background of (neo)extractivism and the Peruvian case of half a century of oil violence. Our argument is twofold. On the one hand, we argue that transitional justice can act as a conceptual and analytical lens to better understand and further (claims for) change while also countering the invisibilization of ...

The Philippines is not typically the focus of transitional justice (TJ) scholarship. Yet, it has had to deal with violent legacies pertaining to each generation of TJ and has installed several TJ initiatives in response to this. This has given rise to a densely populated TJ landscape, spanning different periods and regions and including both formal and informal initiatives within various TJ pillars. In spite of this plethora of initiatives, the ...

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 ...