Introduction: resistance and transitional justice

Jones, Briony; Bernath, Julie

doi:10.4324/9781315228341-1

Cited by 6 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…In previous work on resistance and transitional justice I have found, along with my co-authors and collaborators, that we can make gains in our analysis of transitional justice if we take resistance seriously as an object of enquiry (Jones and Bernath 2017a). This is an important argument to make because resistance, in transitional justice scholarship, is primarily associated with spoilers.…”

Section: Resistance As a Way Of Not Knowing Transitional Justicementioning

confidence: 97%

“…The tendency to dismiss actors assumed to be working against transitional justice means that the label of spoiler obfuscates ongoing and legitimate debates over the nature of past violence and the different ways to address it. This chapter builds on my prior work on resistance and transitional justice (Jones and Bernath 2017a) and combines it with a politics of knowledge lens in order to further strengthen my argument that "resistance" should be taken seriously as an object of inquiry in transitional justice. There is varied work on resistance from different fields, but I use here the work of political geographers, anthropologists and political scientists to understand resistance as socially constructed, meaning that we should try and understand why and how acts are labelled as resistance when others are not.…”

Section: Rethinking Transitional Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

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In the Shadow of Transitional Justice

Elcheroth¹,

Mel²

2021

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This volume bridges two different research fields and the current debates within them. On the one hand, the transitional justice literature has been shaken by powerful calls to make the doctrine and practice of justice more transformative. On the other hand, collective memory studies now tend to look more closely at meaningful silences to make sense of what nations leave out when they remember their pasts. The book extends the scope of this heuristic approach to the different mechanisms that come under the umbrella of transitional justice, including legal prosecution, truth-seeking and reparations, alongside memorialization.The 15 chapters included in the volume, written by expert scholars from diverse disciplinary and societal backgrounds, explore a range of practices intended to deal with the past, and how making the invisible visible again can make transitional justiceor indeed any societal engagement with the pastmore transformative. Seeking to combine contextual depth and comparative width, the book features two key case analyses -South Africa and Sri Lankaalongside discussions of multiple cases, including such emblematic sites as Rwanda and Argentina, but also sites better known for resisting than for embracing international norms of transitional justice, such as Turkey or Côte d'Ivoire. The different contributions, grouped in themed sections, progressively explore the issues, actors and resources that are typically forgotten when societies celebrate their pasts rather than mourning their losses and, in doing so, open new possibilities to build more inclusive processes for addressing the present consequences of past injustice.

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Section: Resistance As a Way Of Not Knowing Transitional Justicementioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Rethinking Transitional Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

In the Shadow of Transitional Justice

Elcheroth¹,

Mel²

2021

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“…In this context, ‘success’ was given meaning through linear progression as a transition from war, violence and oppression to peace, justice and democracy. This teleology of transitional justice means that transformation processes that are slow, stalled or contested are necessarily cast as unsuccessful, in contrast to a managed and linear transformation ( Jones and Bernath, 2017 ). Colvin has referred to this as a reliance on a discourse of ‘technique’, meaning that: .…”

Section: The Intersection Between Knowledge and Transitional Justice: Constructing That Which We Namementioning

confidence: 99%

The performance and persistence of transitional justice and its ways of knowing atrocity

Jones¹

2020

Cooperation and Conflict

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Transitional justice, like other peacebuilding endeavours, strives to create change in the world and to produce knowledge that is useful. However, the politics of how this knowledge is produced, shared and rendered legitimate depends upon the relationships between different epistemic communities, the way in which transitional justice has developed as a field and the myriad contexts in which it is embedded at local, national and international levels. In particular, forms of ‘expert’ knowledge tend to be legal, foreign and based on models to be replicated elsewhere. Work on epistemic communities of peacebuilding can be usefully brought to bear on transitional justice, speaking to current debates in the literature on positionality, justice from below, marginalisation and knowledge imperialism. This article offers two contributions to the field of transitional justice: (1) an analysis of the way the field has developed as an epistemic community(ies) and the relevance of this for a politics of knowledge; and (2) an argument for the politics of knowledge to be more widely discussed and understood as a factor in shaping transitional justice policy and practice, and as a call to a more ethical relationship with the supposed beneficiaries of transitional justice interventions.

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“…By extension, there is an important infrapolitics of transitional justice that merits exploration. Fundamentally, ‘if we treat resistance as a valid object of inquiry, rather than dismiss it as a form of deviance problematic for policy goals, it can reveal the alternative visions of peace and justice that may be present in any given society’ (Jones, 2016: 80; see also Jones and Bernath, 2018). Enabling these visions to emerge and take shape is a critical part of developing more collaborative (and hence agentic) ways of doing transitional justice that reposition the relationship between ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ as one of synergy and partnership.…”

Section: Silence and Transitional Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

Finding a Voice: Silence and its Significance for Transitional Justice

Clark

2019

Social & Legal Studies

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On the surface at least, silence appears to have no obvious or legitimate place within transitional justice. The latter is about voice and about truth-telling, about creating a factual record of what happened. The core aim of the article, however, is to demonstrate that silence is highly relevant to transitional justice. To develop this argument, it explores two possible and interrelated functions of silence – as a form of resistance and as a survival strategy. Conceptualizing silence as a form of absence, and emphasizing a dialectical relationship between silence as being and becoming, the article underlines the transformative possibilities of silence and their significance for transitional justice. In particular, silence can aid in the development of more agentic and contextually sensitive ways of dealing with the past. A major challenge for transitional justice, thus, is to find ways of allowing silence to ‘speak’.

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Introduction: resistance and transitional justice

Cited by 6 publications

References 1 publication

In the Shadow of Transitional Justice

In the Shadow of Transitional Justice

The performance and persistence of transitional justice and its ways of knowing atrocity

Finding a Voice: Silence and its Significance for Transitional Justice

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