Might Makes Right: War-Related Payments in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Mapping the Nexus of Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding

“…Kora Andrieu (2010, 543-544) uses Mani's re-envisioning of transitional justice as reparative justice as the basis for critiquing the teleological logic of peacebuilding and democratization. Nancy Fraser's (2008, 6) formulation of 'redistribution, recognition and representation' as three dimensions of justice, with corresponding injustices that can be identified and named as a result, is the basis for a contribution to a much wider field of social and cultural theory but creates a similar analytic to Lambourne's or Mani's that scholars of transitional justice and peacebuilding have been able to apply (see Lai 2016;Hronesova 2016;O'Reilly 2016).…”

“…Another form of inequality, the stratification of survivor/victim groups based on their unequal access to social and political capital, also influences how transitional justice and peacebuilding processes are shaped (Hronesova 2016;Lai 2016;O'Reilly 2016). As the authors in this volume show, international intervention and peacebuilding practices can inadvertently set up political systems in which victim and survivor groups must become efficient lobbyists and pander to local power games in order to achieve transitional justice goals such as reparations or specific laws.…”

“…Scholars' and activists' rationales for recommending non-judicial transitional justice processes such as a pan-ex-Yugoslav truth and reconciliation commission (the Regional Commission or RECOM) suggested that creating more space for alternative accounts would strengthen peace by undermining the hegemony of post-war ethnopolitics (Simić and Volčič 2013). The approaches to conceptualizing justice that emerge from studies of the post-Yugoslav cases start to demonstrate both the diversity of how justice may be understood (as Lai 2016, Hronesova 2016and O'Reilly 2016 show in this issue) and the shift from 'peace versus justice' to a concept that 'there can be no peace without justice' that Clark (2011, 539) suggests came to characterize peacebuilding interventions through and after the establishment of conflict resolution mechanisms for Rwanda and BosniaHerzegovina.…”

“…Indeed, even the nature of what may become known as transitional justice or as peace being built is often the result of what individual groups and actors are able to negotiate, either with local governments or with external funders (see O'Reilly 2016;Hronesova 2016). Care must, as a result, be taken to disaggregate the normative goals of transitional justice-peace, reconciliation, justice, truth.…”

“…As the authors in this volume show, international intervention and peacebuilding practices can inadvertently set up political systems in which victim and survivor groups must become efficient lobbyists and pander to local power games in order to achieve transitional justice goals such as reparations or specific laws. Transitional justice here reveals itself as not just subject to competing interpretations but as wholly dependent on a number of dynamics not originally envisaged as part of its normative aims, such as bargaining, negotiating, accessing capital and engaging with local politics which are often-despite the frequent 'romanticization' of the local in peacebuilding practice (Richmond 2009c)-a site of illiberality or oppression (see Arnould 2016;Lai 2016;Hronesova 2016).…”