The Popular Appeal of Human Rights Activism: Reimagining Transitional Justice as a Political Struggle

Abstract

How do human rights activists imagine transitional justice amid sociopolitical conflicts that surface after peace agreements? Since its inception in the 2016 peace accords, Colombia's renewed endeavor to come to terms with its violent past has been overshadowed by massive protests and political polarization. In this article, I argue that populism, defined as a grid of intelligibility to make sense of frustrated demands and engage in politics, can help us understand the protest discourses of human rights defenders on transitional justice as they emerge from experiences with political marginalization and broken state promises. Based on interviews during six months of fieldwork in different conflict-affected regions, I contend that human rights defenders imagine transitional justice in terms of a larger political struggle that exceeds justice for past atrocities and can be described through three tropes that both resound with and challenge populism debates: truth as the frontier of political confrontation with right-wing elites, the “rights-defending victim” as a form of popular subjectivity and political underdog, and liberal overhaul of corrupted democratic institutions. Conceptually, my reconstruction of activist discourses serves a two-fold purpose: it bridges debates on transitional justice and contentious politics, and constructively challenges the ostensible incompatibility of human rights and populism.