Contested Governance: Understanding Justice Interventions in Post-Qadhafi Libya

Mapping the Nexus of Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding

“…The implication that international actors engaged in peacebuilding in post-conflict contexts, and their focus on institutions, often help build systems which are not always conducive to transitional justice, is also demonstrated by other authors in this volume: Hronesova (2016), Lai (2016) and Lamont (2016). Focusing on Bosnia, Hronesova (2016) connects peacebuilding and transitional justice literature by discussing how the international efforts to peacebuild in Bosnia inadvertently created a political system in which only the most vocal groups of survivors (especially those aligning themselves along 'ethnic' lines and pandering to party politics) manage to access decision-makers and benefit from their manipulation of the local system of governance (one originally mandated by the international community).…”

“…This dynamic is also picked up by Martin (2016), who, echoing Lamont (2016), highlights how local practices of justice and the return to 'normal' are invisible or dismissed by international transitional justice projects. Martin highlights an important dynamic, suggesting that transitional justice often focuses on the extraordinary-war, conflict, violence-and the mechanisms set up for dealing with the past often ask people to revisit these episodes, which sometimes lie outside of their everyday experiences.…”

“…This dynamic is resonant in Lamont's (2016) paper, too, where he discusses how the international community mandated a state-centric vision of transitional justice, in a context in which the state was highly contested. Lamont argues that the internationally mandated statebuilding in Libya, based on the liberal peacebuilding notion of the transition to democracy and a market-based economy, disempowered voices that did not privilege the state.…”

“…Competitive bidding between local NGOs for external funding means that what transitional justice initiatives become implemented are dependent on who gets which grant; in turn, the funded initiatives become visible and leaders of these projects become spokespersons for 'local transitional justice', obscuring less tangible local engagement with the past (Martin 2016). Moreover, many of these, sometimes invisible, local processes of facing the past have their roots in religious practice (see Martin 2016;Lamont 2016). Yet the global narrative or 'global project' (Nagy 2008) which drives transitional justice practice and peacebuilding, and which is deeply underscored by ideas of the liberal peace, often overlooks the religious as a possible site of confronting the past-not least since religious ideologies are often seen as the cause of many post-Cold War conflicts (Clark 2010).…”

“…These questions can be asked for any transitional justice/ peacebuilding intervention. For instance, critical peacebuilding debates about agency, local knowledge and the everyday make it possible to perceive the structural implications that occur when local justice practices which may have had similar goals to 'transitional justice' projects but pre-dated the arrival of international peacebuilding efforts have been overlooked or dismissed as strategies for achieving 'transitional justice', in favour of other imported mechanisms, once internationally driven processes of peacebuilding take hold (see Lamont 2016;Martin 2016).…”