Justice Visions

• Innovation and Documentation in Transitional Justice

  The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast turns the spotlight on the role of documentation in transitional justice. This theme will guide much of our future work as Tine Destrooper’s project GROUNDOC “Innovation and documentation: Reconstructing the paradigm of transitional justice from the ground up” was awarded an ERC Grant. In this conversation Tine Destrooper, Brigitte Herremans, and Elke Evrard explore the centrality of documentation in TJ initiatives. They discuss how innovations in documentation practices – particularly those emerging from grassroots actors – challenge us to reimagine the TJ paradigm. Highlighting the politics of documentation, Elke Evrard emphasizes how community-based acts challenge conventional notions of evidence and foreground questions of narrative ownership. She also draws attention to the increasing role of new media and digital technologies in documentation processes. While these tools may democratize the landscape because they offer new possibilities for collecting, verifying, and preserving evidence, “the expertise and the technical knowledge that these tools require, can also reinforce certain existing power imbalances between who is creating knowledge and whose knowledge is validated.” Drawing on her research in Syria and Palestine, Brigitte Herremans highlights how grassroots actors are using innovative approaches to documentation as a baseline for proposing new ways of 'doing transitional justice'. For these justice actors, documentation is not only intended to facilitate judicial proceedings, it is a counter-hegemonic practice that challenges epistemic injustice in various ways. “It’s not just 'cold archiving', but the cold archiving is also part of it. And that's so interesting: the interaction between a variety of actors who understand that what they're doing together serves a higher purpose, because they need to resist the erasure of these violations.” Tine Destrooper emphasizes that these contemporary and experimental transitional justice practices are causing a paradigm shift. A more ecosystemic understanding of transitional justice is needed, and documentation efforts driven by grassroots justice actors are a central component thereof. This emerging reality requires us to "rethink transitional justice and transitional justice change theories from the ground up, not just to respond to two decades of increasingly critical transitional justice scholarship, but also to really better capture the reality of those contemporary transitional justice struggles.”

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• Rethinking Justice: Palestine and the Limitations of International Law

  In this special episode of Justice Visions, we shift our typical focus on innovations in transitional justice to a broader debate about international law, its shortcomings, and how to rethink it in ways that benefit victim-survivors of gross human rights violations. We do so on the occasion of the inaugural Lecture of the Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University, which this year was given by Palestinian-American human rights attorney, legal scholar, and activist Noura Erakat. The Chair is awarded to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the field of human rights.In an interview which took place just before the lecture, Brigitte Herremans talks with Noura about the limits and possibilities of international law amid unfolding atrocities in Gaza. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law, Noura argues that, though not neutral and biased against those most in need of protection, can still be repurposed by those mobilizing it to resist injustices. While Noura’s work and activism focus on Gaza, her arguments about the possibilities and challenges of International Law are relevant to a broad range of  TJ practitioners and scholars who are working in contexts of ongoing conflicts and entrenched accountability crises. It offers critical insights about how legal tools can be reclaimed in transnational struggles, rethinking justice beyond formal mechanisms. Touching on survivor-led agency, Noura challenges the framing of Palestinians as passive victim-survivors. Instead, she insists on recognizing their active role in resisting domination and their capacity to demonstrate the full spectrum of their potential as humans, despite the genocide and complicity of states in the Global North. For Noura, part of the Palestinian victory lies not only in the struggle for liberation, but in living that liberation, through joy, care, and collective action. As she states: "We are not defined by what Israel does to us. We are defined by who we are. We are defined by what we do, what we produce, what we write, how we love one another…. We are defined by who we are, despite that harm, and how we respond to it.”Throughout the conversation, Noura emphasizes the importance of counter-hegemonic knowledge production and the need to resist dominant legal and media frameworks as these continue to erase Palestinian experiences and perspectives. She calls for a decolonial and feminist understanding of justice, and resistance that connects Palestine to global struggles. She also reminds us of the responsibility that comes with activism. “If Palestinians who have been placed in a cage and basically shot at with the most advanced weapons technology is a form of experimentation and without mercy have not given up. What right do I have to give up?”

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  21:35
• The future of Transitional Justice in Post-Assad Syria

  On December 8, 2024 the unthinkable happened: the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.This new episode of the Justice Visions podcast explores how the mobilization for justice shapes up in the post-Assad era. Brigitte Herremans is joined by our new colleague, Layla Zibar, an urban researcher who focuses on the spatio-temporal dimensions of forced displacements and justice. Together they examine what this historic moment means for the struggle for justice and how it affects victim participation and leadership.Joining the discussion are Yasmen Almeshan, founding member of the Caesar Families Association, and Lina Ghoutouk, a human rights defender researching the gendered impact of enforced disappearances. Yasmen and Lina share their perspectives on the fate of Syria’s disappeared, the urgent need to safeguard detention centers and mass graves, and the growing demand for victim participation in justice processes. The fall of the Assad regime and the transition have reshaped the struggle for justice, truth, and memorialization. One of the main challenges now is to ensure that justice is not delayed or denied.Yasmen has just returned from Syria, where she joined over 50 experts in a workshop on transitional justice, underscoring civil society’s role in shaping the transition, if the new caretaker government engages. The road to justice is long, Yasmen highlights, with the immediate priority being safeguarding records and mass graves, crucial to uncovering the fate of the missing, the most painful and urgent issue. "The stark contrast between the number of those documented as missing and the relatively small number of those released was a heartbreaking shock. It meant that the likelihood of our loved ones being dead had increased significantly, and any hope of their return had all but vanished. Conflicting reports about their fate, along with a spread of rumors, often fueled by social media, only added to the confusion."Lina emphasizes the urgent need for trust among stakeholders and cooperation from the caretaker government, international institutions such as the Independent Institution for Missing Persons in Syria, civil society, and victims. The Syrian government should, in her view, focus on urgent transitional justice measures, such as securing detention centers and mass graves, preserving evidence, and preventing impunity. The most pressing issue is the call from families of the disappeared for a unified approach to address their plight. "They need one place that they can go to and inquire about the fate of their loved ones. They really need to know where they can go to have verified information, to know about services and to inquire about what is available for them and for the survivors and also for the families."

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  38:35
• Queering Transitional Justice

  This new episode zooms in on the invisibilization of certain voices in transitional justice discourse and practice, namely LGBTQIA+ and children’s perspectives, whose lives and experiences have been excluded from most formal and informal transitional justice initiatives. Our guests, Pascha Bueno-Hansen and Caitlin Biddolph, both conduct research on transitional justice issues from LGBTQIA+, intersectional and decolonial perspectives. Pascha, associate professor at the University of Delaware, works on LGBTQIA+ mobilization and resistance in defense of human rights in Latin America. Caitlin, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, spoke about one strand of her research that focuses on queering childhood in global transitional justice governance.Both scholars touch upon how LGBTQIA +, intersectional, and decolonial approaches help problematize and unsettle some of the current assumptions and challenges in transitional justice.Pascha foregrounds that both the gender and sex binary, as well as the temporally bounded nature of transitional justice, limit our understanding of structural and historical violence against certain populations. This is clear for example, in the erasure of the lived experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community from transitional justice initiatives. Caitlin focuses on the paternalistic and protectionist nature of global transitional justice governance that tends to depict (queer) children as passive victims stripping their agency away and thus reproducing power hierarchies. They both see opportunities in local intergenerational spaces to dismantle these discourses and practices. Through examples from Latin America, Pascha reflects how artivism paved the way to include LGBTQIA+ issues in transitional justice mechanisms. She also stresses how “younger generations have done such an incredible job of making inroads into inclusive language and preferred gender pronouns. And that is something that the older generations struggle with comprehending”.  Intergenerational dialogues can make global transitional justice more inclusive; Caitlin emphasizes too. She sees this as an opportunity to “stitching together stories across temporalities… of trying to put together the fabric of a country so that we have a more rich and ongoing narrative about injustice and violence and atrocity”. In her view, this has the potential of destabilizing power hierarchies present in global transitional justice institutions and turn them into dialogical and relational processes.

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  36:40
• Victim Participation as Labor

  In this new episode we zoom in on an oft-overlooked dimension of victim participation in formal transitional justice processes, namely the labor that victims invest in justice processes. In a conversation with professor Leila Ulrich, we explore the intricate relationship between the ICC’s engagement with victims and the global capitalist systems in which the court operates. The dynamics of under-valorization of victims time-investment, the offloading of care work to local and gendered practitioners, and the invisibilization of victims’ contributions to formal justice processes, characterize many international justice processes, Leila argues. Therefore, it is crucial to acknowledge and make this work politically visible as labor. Foregrounding the knowledge, resources, and time people dedicate allows us to acknowledge their contributions and better understand the depth of their involvement. "[T]here is a lot of tension between those who work and those who don't work in the same way that there's a lot of tension between those who are recognised as victims and those who are not. So there's a lot of complexities and paradoxes involved in how victim participation functions." In this new episode, Tine Destrooper is joined by co-host Kim Baudewijns, who recently became a member of the Justice Visions' team, doing research on TJ processes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kim’s work situates this conversation in the broader landscape of justice initiatives: standardized and informal, local and international, judicial and non-judicial, etc. This inspires a reflection on how victims’ roles alter across these various justice sites.

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