Taking the Question of a TJ "Blueprint" to #ISA2024
The project team organised a panel at the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention, San Francisco, 3-6 April 2024. The panel (TD47) was entitled ‘The Standardisation of Transitional Justice: The Making and Localisation of an International Blueprint’ and scheduled for Thu. 4 April.
The panel was chaired by Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, who did a great job ensuring that we had a good amount of time left for questions and discussions after the presentations. Adriana Rudling, in her role as discussant, asked pertinent questions and had a wealth of suggestions for literature that will push the project forward and perhaps in new directions.
The five papers spoke to the question of an international blueprint for transitional justice, taking different theoretical approaches and building on case studies in different regions of the world.
Wladimir Santana Fernandes presented his preliminary findings on the establishment and nature of the Independent Institution for Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic. He showed how, across four phases of coming into being, TJ standards and the nature of law shaped the conditions of possibility for this new International Institution.
Lyn Kouadio presented her study of the TJ toolbox in Cote d’Ivoire, particularly the truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) tool. She analysed the different ways in which the ‘truth’ of the Ivorian TRC embodies, mobilises and generates power and politics. TRCs curate truths in ways that create rather than merely reflect politics.
Adriana Romero analysed survivor-perpetrator hearings at Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). Focusing on hearings involving victims, survivors, and former FARC insurgents, she argued that they were ‘moments full of rage’ in TJ sessions that were supposed to be ‘nice and restorative’. She analysed this practice of TJ in terms of language, body and emotions.
The paper by Line Jakobsen and Thomas Obel Hansen explored the ‘boundary work’ involved in maintaining a model, script or standard of TJ. They see both expansion and confinement of the model and focused on two justice issues that challenge the boundaries of TJ: environmental justice and corporate accountability.
Line Engbo Gissel proposed that theories of international standardisation can help us analyse the model and blueprint of TJ in ways that emphasise power, agency, relationality, inequality, and plurality. TJ standardisation is ideational and material, (re)produce horizontal and vertical relationships across scales, and allows us to study both the production of a generic model and its differentiated translation, appropriation and articulation.
In the Q&A, members of the audience posed very good questions to the participants, drawing on their own research on TJ in Morocco, Syria and Colombia.
For more information, please email lgissel@ruc.dk.