Effects of Invisibility: In Search of the 'Economic' in Transitional Justice

Transitional Justice and Its Discontents: Socioeconomic Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Limits of International Intervention

“…This reformulation is best understood in relation to two elements. Their analysis shows that international reactions to the protests effectively reproduced the 'invisibility' of socioeconomic problems in transitional justice efforts (Miller 2008), and that international engagement with Bosnian society is 'hedged around by other commitments, to certain kinds of market arrangements or individual rights' (Williams and Young 2012).…”

“…However, justice issues were still tightly linked to the 'reform of the judiciary and law enforcement agencies' and the fight against organised crime, 21 excluding demands related to failed privatisation processes and economic crimes that had sparked the protests in the first place. Socioeconomic justice, therefore, still remains foreign to the transitional justice-peacebuilding nexus, and in contrast with the direction taken by the economic reforms promoted by the international community (Miller 2008;Laplante 2014).…”

Mapping the Nexus of Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding

“…Dustin Sharp (2013b, 151), like Sriram, notes that transitional justice is 'increasingly associated' with 'narrow transitions to democracy' and peacebuilding and is often 'yet another box to tick on the "post-conflict checklist"'. He goes on to identify a socioeconomic dimension to the liberal peace, so closely associated with 'transitions to liberal market democracy' as well as top-down institutional capacity-building (Sharp 2013b, 152), leading to questions of socioeconomic (in)justice in liberal market transitions which the peacebuilding and transitional justice literatures have often, though not always (Mani 2002;Pugh 2005;Miller 2008;Pugh, Cooper, and Turner 2008;Waldorf 2012;Jennings and Bøås 2015), ignored. The erasure of 'structural colonial violence' from and through transitional justice-which Sarah Maddison and Laura Shepherd (2014) make visible by applying insights from critical peacebuilding studies-runs even deeper.…”

“…As mechanisms and processes, however, both transitional justice and peacebuilding tend to ignore the question of capital-economic, social and political-while transitional justice's focus on truth and justice often leaves no room to examine the less tangible ways in which populations and communities feel affected by conflicts (Miller 2008;Lambourne 2009, 34). As Sharp (2013b, 149) notes, the 'historically dominant liberal' paradigm of transitional justice has narrowed responses to violence to such an extent that it has marginalized questions of 'economic violence and economic justice'.…”

Feminist scholarship in transitional justice: a de-politicising impulse?

“…In South Africa, the occlusions of racial and economic inequalities in the TRC are understood to be intimately connected. In one of the most important contributions to this debate from mainstream transitional justice literature, Zineida Miller (2008) has crafted the following argument regarding the consequences of occluding structural economic injustice from transitional justice scholarship and practice: firstly, it leads to an incomplete understanding of the origins of conflict, which in turn results in an inability to imagine structural change due to a focus on reparations, and therefore, ultimately leads to the possibility of renewed violence due to a failure to address the role of inequality in conflict. The mainstreaming of this question might superficially be evidenced by the adoption of the ICTJ of a project on 'making connections' between transitional justice and development (de Greiff & Duthie, 2009).…”