“We Don't Believe in Transitional Justice:” Peace and the Politics of Legal Ideas in Colombia

Abstract

This article draws on law and society theories on the circulation of legal ideas to explain the instrumentalization of transitional justice in Colombia. Most scholarship explains transitional justice as a theoretical framework or as a set of instruments that helps redress mass violence. In contrast, this study reveals that the idea serves as a placeholder for different political actors to promote their respective interests. Drawing on over fifty interviews, the study suggests that the power of transitional justice lies in its malleability, which is both its strength and its weakness, as those with different political agendas can appropriate the idea in contradictory ways. The findings emphasize that understanding transitional justice requires a turn from abstract analyses that either take the idea for granted or try to define its meaning toward examining how people on the ground understand the idea, and how they translate those understandings into political action.

Analysis of the Colombian Constitutional Court's Transformative Approach to Conflict-Related Sexual Violence

“…As a result, during the whole peace process, and notably before the peace agreement was signed, the CCC 1 reviewed TJ legislation and government practices to ensure that they aligned with international obligations and, more specifically, with a victim-centred and transformative perspective (Nauenberg Dunkell, 2021). Indeed, in Colombia, one of the main actors in this transitional process has been the CCC, both before and after the Habana Peace Accords in 2016 (Bernal, 2022;Rowen, 2017). More specifically, its work has been critical in upholding the rights of women in the context of armed conflict in the years prior to the signing of the peace agreement in 2016 (Lemaitre and Sandvik, 2014;Meertens, 2010;Meertens and Zambrano, 2010).…”

“…Indeed, in Colombia, one of the main actors in this transitional process has been the CCC, both before and after the Habana Peace Accords in 2016 (Bernal, 2022; Rowen, 2017). More specifically, its work has been critical in upholding the rights of women in the context of armed conflict in the years prior to the signing of the peace agreement in 2016 (Lemaitre and Sandvik, 2014; Meertens, 2010; Meertens and Zambrano, 2010).…”

Left-wing melancholia and activist memories of the Colombian conflict in Fabiola Calvo Ocampo’s Hablarán de mí

“…Indeed, while the country’s turn to transitional justice would appear to suggest it was finally ‘coming to terms’ with the legacy of the armed conflict, this actually belies what has been referred to as a ‘battle for memory’ (Alarcón, 2020) in which ‘a multitude of complex mnemonic communities’ (Carrillo Lerma, 2016: 198) have articulated diverse narratives of the multifaceted war. Reflecting how critical transitional justice scholarship has interrogated the field’s narrow legalistic focus and called for a ‘thicker’ understanding (McEvoy, 2007) of how these concepts and practices work in ‘specific fields of political contestation’ (Theidon, 2009: 297), the Colombian case provides a paradigmatic example of how discourses of transitional justice and memory have been mobilised by diverse groups with contrasting political agendas over the last few decades (Rowen, 2017: 627). Indeed, alongside the creation of official memory practices, the country has seen the proliferation of numerous grassroots, unofficial memory projects (Reátegui Carrillo, 2009), many of which predate the creation of state-led institutions.…”

“… 4. While the 2005 Justice and Peace Law was presented by the Colombian government of President Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010) as ‘a peace process requiring new and explicit “restorative” understandings of justice’ (Díaz, 2008: 189), this occurred within a paradoxical context in which the government refused to neither recognise the existence of the armed conflict itself nor negotiate with the left-wing guerrilla groups who were labelled narco-terrorists (Riaño and Uribe, 2017: 10–11). Critics of the law have thus argued that discourses of transitional justice were adopted as part of an attempt to minimise the state’s own role in the armed conflict (Rowen, 2017: 630). Despite the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, this ‘denialist politics’ has continued under successive right-wing governments and resulted in the expulsion of the National Centre for Historical Memory, under director Ruben Darío Acevedo, from the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience in 2020 (Rodríguez Castro, 2020), as well as marked a shift away from an initial attempt by official memory institutions to construct more comprehensive and plural narratives about violence in Colombia (Riaño and Uribe, 2017).…”

Finding the Roads to Justice? Examining Trajectories of Transition for Internally Displaced Women in Colombia

“…This needs to be complemented with data on the overall victims' population and on the opinions and attitudes of the average Colombian. Commentators have also voiced concern about the possibility that transitional justice -through its malleability -may crowd out or undermine sustained attention to deeper political conflicts (Rowen 2016). Similarly, Lemaitre (2016) questions the assumption that victims and states share the values of the transitional justice apparatus, describing how women's reconstruction of everyday life in the aftermath of displacement responds to normative commitments to strength and solidarity that are absent from official policy.…”