Re Thinking Transitional Justice For The 21st Century

Challenges conventional views of what it means to 'do justice' in the aftermath of mass atrocities, from a legal perspective.

Responding to a diplomatic stalemate and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, Yemen’s civil actors work every day to build peace in fragmented local communities across the country. This book shows how their efforts relate to longstanding justice demands in Yemeni society, and details three decades of alternating elite indifference toward, or strategic engagement with, questions of justice. Exploring the transformative impact of the 2011 uprising and Yemenis’ substantive wrestling with questions of justice in the years that followed, leading Yemen scholar Stacey Philbrick Yadav shows how the transitional process was ultimately overtaken by war, and explains why features of the transitional framework nevertheless remain a central reference point for civil actors engaged in peacebuilding today. In the absence of a negotiated settlement, everyday peacebuilding has become a new site for justice work, as an arena in which civil actors enjoy agency and social recognition. Drawing on seventeen years of field research and interviews with civil actors, Yadav positions Yemen’s non-combatants not–or not only–as victims of conflict, but as political agents imagining and enacting the justice they wish to see.

This Palgrave Handbook examines the ways in which researchers and practitioners theorise, analyse, produce and make use of testimony. It explores the full range of testimony in the public sphere, including perpetrator testimony, testimony presented through social media and virtual reality. A growing body of research shows how complex and multi-layered testimony can be, how much this complexity adds to our understanding of our past, and how creators and users of testimony have their own complex purposes. These advances indicate that many of our existing assumptions about testimony and models for working with it need to be revisited. The purpose of this Palgrave Handbook is to do just that by bringing together a wide range of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and practice-based perspectives.

Since the end of the Cold War, humanitarian interventions have continued to evolve and respond to a wide range of political crises. These insightful essays focus on the challenges associated with interventions when facing conflict and human rights violations, unmitigated systematic violence, state re-building, human mobility and dislocation. Each chapter is linked to the rest through three defining themes that permeate the book: the evolution of humanitarian interventions in a global era; the limits of sovereignty and the ethics of interventions; and the politics of post-intervention: (re)-building and humanitarian engagement. The authors incorporate a variety of case studies including Kosovo, Timor-Leste, Syria, Libya and Iraq, and examine the complexity of interventions across their different dimensions, including relevant doctrines such as R2P, 'Use of Force' and Human Security.

This book presents new theoretical and conceptual perspectives on the problematique of building just and durable peace. Linking peace and justice has sparked lively debates about the dilemmas and trade-offs in several contemporary peace processes. Despite the fact that justice and peace are commonly referred to there is surprisingly little research and few conceptualizations of the interplay between the two. This edited volume is the result of three years of collaborative research and draws upon insights from such disciplines as peace and conflict, international law, political science and international relations. It contains policy-relevant knowledge about effective peacebuilding strategies, as well as an in-depth analysis of the contemporary peace processes in the Middle East and the Western Balkans. Using a variety of theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches, the work makes an original contribution to the growing literature on peacebuilding. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, peace and conflict studies, Middle Eastern Politics, European Politics and IR/Security Studies.

This important anthology provides students and teachers with voices of social and global justice that have been marginalized or forgotten by history. It gives thought-leaders, from the Global South a platform and engages the voices of oppressed communities, including Charles Mills and Franz Fanon and Ella Baker. This text is a comprehensive analysis of modern and contemporary theories of justice. Since the publication in 1971 of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, there has been much debate on his views from both the right and the left of the political spectrum. But there is a lack of textbooks that provide not only a compilation of substantial selections on challenges to Rawls’s theory from feminist and postcolonial scholars but that also include writings by non-white and non-Western authors on different aspects of justice. This book fills this huge gap and brings together many influential writings on the topic of justice that are often omitted in philosophy and political theory collections. This work addresses complex issues in an increasingly diverse society.

How did civil society function as a locus for reconciliation initiatives since the beginning of the 20th century? The essays in this volume challenge the conventional understanding of reconciliation as a benign state-driven process. They explore how a range of civil society actors - from Turkish intellectuals apologizing for the Armenian Genocide to religious organizations working towards the improvement of Franco-German relations - have confronted and coped with the past. These studies offer a critical perspective on local and transnational reconciliation acts by questioning the extent to which speech became an alternative to silence, remembrance to forgetting, engagement to oblivion.

A just and sustainable peace for Syria can only be attained through the equal participation of women’s rights defenders at the negotiation table and throughout the transitional process. Understanding the legal framework within which such participation takes place – and the challenges of promoting women’s rights through a gender-responsive constitution – is crucial. This publication, resulting from a collaboration between Euromed Feminist Initiative and the University of Padova, builds on the knowledge of academics and advocates, shedding new insights on those challenges. It aims at supporting institutional efforts being made to guarantee women’s participation in the Syrian reconstruction, as well as advocacy initiatives carried out to ensure women’s participation in political and economic decision-making in the country’s future.