Peacebuilding and the postcolonial politics of transitional justice
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/21647259.2014.899133
ISSN2164-7267
AutoresSarah Maddison, Laura J. Shepherd,
Tópico(s)Cambodian History and Society
ResumoAbstractThe literature on transitional justice tends to conceive of transition as a bounded process that takes place immediately following a conflict, rather than envision the process as part of building peace. Significantly, this literature tends to separate historical conflict and contemporary transition. While the similarities between historical and recent conflict are often acknowledged, the remedies available under the transitional justice framework are rarely applied to the violence and historical injustice that are inherent to settler colonialism. This omission creates some troubling silences in the transitional justice literature, which this article seeks to address through drawing on critical peacebuilding scholarship. This article considers what might be learned about the processes and challenges of transition by expanding the temporal frame in which transitional justice is placed. The article suggests that transition may in fact be a far lengthier, more complex, and more challenging process than the literature generally concedes. More significantly, by focusing on colonial violence, the conventional conceptualisations of both ‘transition’ and ‘justice’ can be challenged.Keywords:: transitional justicepostcolonialismsettler colonialismindigenous peoplesAustralia Notes 1 Brandon Hamber, ‘Transitional Justice and Intergroup Conflict’, in The Oxford Handbook of Intergroup Conflict, ed. Linda R. Topp (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 329. 2 Zinaida Miller, ‘Effects of Invisibility: In Search of the “Economic” in Transitional Justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 3 (2008): 266. 3 Phil Clark and Nicola Palmer, ‘Challenging Transitional Justice’, in Critical Perspectives in Transitional Justice, ed. Nicola Palmer, Phil Clark and Danielle Granville (Cambridge: Intersentia Publishing, 2012), 8. 4 Will Kymlicka, ‘Transitional Justice, Federalism, and the Accommodation of Minority Nationalism’, in Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies, ed. Paige Arthur (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 304. 5 Edward Newman, ‘“Transitional Justice”: The Impact of Transnational Norms and the UN’, International Peacekeeping 9, no. 2 (2002): 31. 6 Hugo van der Merwe, ‘Delivering Justice through Transition: Research Challenges’, in Assessing the Impact of Transitional Justice: Challenges for Empirical Research, ed. Hugo van der Merwe, Victoria Baxter and Audrey Chapman (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press 2009), 117. 7 Ibid. 8 Christine Bell, ‘Transitional Justice, Interdisciplinarity and the State of the “Field” or “Non-Field”’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 1 (2009): 15. 9 Ann Orford, ‘Commissioning the Truth’, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 15, no. 3 (2006): 880. 10 Chris Chapman, ‘Transitional Justice and the Rights of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples’, in Arthur, Identities in Transition, 256. 11 International Center for Transitional Justice, Strengthening Indigenous Rights through Truth Commissions: A Practitioner's Resource (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2012), 1. 12 Courtney Jung, ‘Canada and the Legacy of the Indian Residential Schools: Transitional Justice for Indigenous People in a Nontransitional Society’, in Arthur, Identities in Transition, 217. 13 Ibid. 14 Miller, ‘Effects of Invisibility’, 267. 15 See, inter alia, Paige Arthur, ‘How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice’, Human Rights Quarterly 31 (2009): 321–67; Bell, ‘Transitional Justice’, 5–27; Roger Duthie, ‘Towards a Development-Sensitive Approach to Transitional Justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 3 (2008): 292–309; Wendy Lambourne, ‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding after Mass Violence’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 1 (2009): 28–48; Rama Mani, ‘Dilemmas of Expanding Transitional Justice, or Forging the Nexus between Transitional Justice and Development’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 3 (2008): 253–65; Naomie Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena, eds., Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Ruti Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 69–94. 16 Bell, ‘Transitional Justice’, 1. 17 Arthur, ‘How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights’. 18 Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’. 19 We do not indicate ‘ideal types’ to each of the categories we identify in the taxonomy provided to provide empirical illustrations of the types. We are interested in the scholarly discourse on transitional justice and the concepts of ‘transition’ and ‘justice’ in scholarly research rather than the application of these concepts to specific transitional justice ‘events’. If we were to provide indicative ‘ideal types’, this would require that we adjudicate between competing interpretive claims related to the various events; there is no consensus in the literature about whether, for example, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is an example of ‘thin’ or ‘thick’ justice over a ‘thin’ or ‘thick’ transitional period. Justifying the choice of empirical examples, if we were to provide them for the taxonomy, would require a discussion of prohibitive length and thus places such a venture beyond the scope of this article. 20 Jon Elster, for example, takes a long historical view of transitional justice practices dating back to ancient Greece (Jon Elster, Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)), while Ruti Teitel proposes that ‘the origins of modern transitional justice can be traced to World War 1’. Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’, 70. We return to the political implications of dating the emergence of transitional justice in the following section. 21 Arthur, ‘How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights’, 325. Relatedly, Christine Bell remarks with interest that ‘scholars and practitioners show no clarity as to whether there is or needs to be a bounded concept of “transition”’ during which transitional justice applies. Bell, ‘Transitional Justice’, 23. 22 Fionnaula Ní Aoláin and Colm Campbell, ‘The Paradox of Transition in Conflict Democracies’, Human Rights Quarterly 27 (2005): 173. 23 Ibid., 182–3; Hamber, ‘Transitional Justice and Intergroup Conflict’. 24 Dirk Venema, ‘Transitions as States of Exception: Towards a More General Theory of Transitional Justice’, in Palmer et al., Critical Perspectives in Transitional Justice, 75. 25 Arthur, ‘How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights’, 333 (emphasis in the original). 26 Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Introduction: Towards an Anthropology of Transitional Justice’, in Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 7. 27 Lambourne, ‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding’, 45. 28 Naomi Roht-Arriaza, ‘The New Landscape of Transitional Justice’, in Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2. 29 Aoláin and Campbell, ‘The Paradox of Transition’, 181. 30 Rosemary Nagy, ‘Transitional Justice as a Global Project: Critical Reflections’, Third World Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2008): 284. 31 Lambourne, ‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding’, 30. 32 See, inter alia, Lambourne, ‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding’; Lisa J. Laplante, ‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding: Diagnosing and Addressing the Socioeconomic Roots of Violence through a Human Rights Framework’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 2 (2008): 331–55; Matthew Mullen, ‘Reassessing the Focus of Transitional Justice: The Need to Move Structural and Cultural Violence to the Centre’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 2013: 1–18, doi: 10.1080/09557571.2012.734778. 33 The concept of ‘structural violence’ was developed by the peace researcher Johan Galtung, although Laplante (‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding’) credits the term to Paul Farmer. Johan Galtung, Essays in Peace Research, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Eljers, 1975); Laplante, ‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding’. Matthew Mullen has recently written at length on ‘the need to move structural and cultural violence to the centre’ of transitional justice concerns, an argument that we support although we do so by drawing attention to the influence of colonial power in the exclusion of these considerations in the first place, with which Mullen does not specifically engage. Mullen, ‘Reassessing the Focus’. 34 Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’, 77. 35 Chandra Lekha Sriram, ‘Justice as Peace? Liberal Peacebuilding and Strategies of Transitional Justice’, Global Society 21, no. 4 (2007): 585. 36 Oliver Richmond, Maintaining Order, Making Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 191; see also Philip Darby, ‘Rolling Back the Frontiers of Empire: Practising the Postcolonial’, International Peacekeeping 16, no. 5 (2009): 699–716; Oliver Richmond, ‘Resistance and the Post-Liberal Peace’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 3 (2010): 665–92; and Michael Pugh, ‘Local Agency and Political Economies of Peacebuilding’, Ethnicities and Nationalism 111, no. 2 (2011): 308–20. 37 Ismael Muvingi, ‘Sitting on Powder Kegs: Socioeconomic Rights in Transitional Societies’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 3, no. 2 (2009): 163–82, 165. 38 Miller, ‘Effects of Invisibility’, 268. 39 Ibid. 40 Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy’, 72–3. 41 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992). While we note that, of course, the USSR and China were included in the Allied powers, we follow Barkawi and Laffey in drawing attention to the popular narrative of the war's end that represents a ‘Western’ victory. See Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, ‘The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies’, Review of International Studies 32 (2006): 329–52. As Stuart Hall has neatly summarised, ‘what we call “the West” … did first emerge in western Europe. But “the West” is no longer only in Europe, and not all of Europe is in “the West”’. See Stuart Hall, ‘The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power’, in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert and Kenneth Thompson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 276 (emphasis in the original). 42 Nagy, ‘Transitional Justice as a Global Project’, 275. 43 Clark and Palmer, ‘Challenging Transitional Justice’, 8. 44 Orford, ‘Commissioning the Truth’, 862. 45 Banjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira, and John M. Hobson, ‘The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23, no. 2 (2011): 1–24. 46 To explore the intellectual foundations of postcolonial theories of global politics, see Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 47 Siba N. Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 48 Teitel, Transitional Justice, 224 (emphasis added). 49 Arthur, ‘How “Transitions” Reshaped Human Rights’, 342. 50 Muvingi, ‘Sitting on Powder Kegs’, 180. 51 Andrew Woolford, ‘Genocide, Affirmative Repair, and the British Columbia Treaty Process’, in Hinton, Transitional Justice, 138. 52 See Vivienne Jabri, ‘Peacebuilding, the Local and the International: A Colonial or a Postcolonial Rationality?’, Peacebuilding 1, no. 1 (2013): 3–16. 53 Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). 54 Orford, ‘Commissioning the Truth’, 854. 55 Ibid. 56 Miller, ‘Effects of Invisibility’, 270. 57 Adrian Guelke, Politics in Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 22. 58 Ibid. 59 Miller, ‘Effects of Invisibility’, 276. 60 Edward Cavanagh, ‘History, Time and the Indigenist Critique’, Arena Journal no. 37/38 (2012): 24. 61 Ibid. 62 Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, ‘The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism’, Arena Journal no. 37/38 (2012): 41. 63 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 2. 64 Chapman, ‘Transitional Justice and the Rights of Minorities’, 261. 65 Guelke, Politics in Deeply Divided Societies, 22. 66 Cavanagh, ‘History, Time and the Indigenist Critique’, 39. 67 Jabri, ‘Peacebuilding, the Local and the International’, 6. 68 Woolford, ‘Genocide, Affirmative Repair’, 137. 69 Damien Short, ‘Reconciliation and the Problem of Internal Colonization’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 26, no. 3 (2005): 269. 70 Bell, ‘Transitional Justice’, 15. 71 Kymlicka, ‘Transitional Justice’, 322. 72 Ibid. 73 Jung, ‘Canada and the Legacy of the Indian Residential Schools’, 241. 74 Woolford, ‘Genocide, Affirmative Repair’, 138. 75 Jung, ‘Canada and the Legacy of the Indian Residential Schools’, 226. 76 Ibid., 231. 77 Woolford, ‘Genocide, Affirmative Repair’, 147. 78 Jung, ‘Canada and the Legacy of the Indian Residential Schools’, 231. 79 Some may date the start of Australia's ‘transition’ to federation in 1901, others may consider a more recent temporal frame, perhaps beginning with the referendum in 1967. Whatever the specific timeframe, however, it is evident that Australia has been engaging with transitional justice mechanisms (including constitutional referenda, truth commissions and apologies) over very many years, in an attempt to grapple with the structural injustices produced by colonisation. 80 César Rodriquez-Garavito and Yukyan Lam, ‘Addressing Violations of Indigenous Peoples’ Territory, Land, and Natural Resources Rights during Conflicts and Transitions', in International Center for Transitional Justice, Strengthening Indigenous Rights through Truth Commissions, 19. 81 Here we draw on Brandon Hamber's definition of truth commissions as ‘temporary ad hoc inquiries into particular events that are officially sanctioned or authorised by the state’ and that ‘typically focus on patterns of events or a series of violations over a specific period of time’. Hamber, ‘Transitional Justice and Intergroup Conflict’, 329. 82 Paige Arthur, ‘Indigenous Self-Determination and Political Rights: Practical Recommendations for Truth Commissions’, in International Center for Transitional Justice, Strengthening Indigenous Rights through Truth Commissions, 37. 83 Australian Human Rights Commission (formerly the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission), Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Australian Human Rights Commission, 1997), 36–7. 84 See, for example, Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003); Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002); and Robert Manne, ed., Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003). For discussion of the deeper reasons underpinning these ‘wars’ see Sarah Maddison, Beyond White Guilt: The Real Challenge for Black–White Relations in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011). 85 Paul Muldoon, ‘Thinking Responsibility Differently: Reconciliation and the Tragedy of Colonization’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 26, no. 3 (2005): 242. 86 Coined by historian Peter Read in the 1980s, the term ‘stolen generation’ has, according to Robert Manne, taken on a similar significance for indigenous Australians as the term ‘the Holocaust’ has for Jews. Robert Manne, ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right’, Quarterly Essay no. 1 (2001): 82. 87 See Emina Subašić and Katherine Reynolds, ‘Beyond “Practical” Reconciliation: Intergroup Inequality and the Meaning of Non-Indigenous Identity’, Political Psychology 30, no. 2 (2009): 243–67. 88 Cavanagh, ‘History, Time and the Indigenist Critique’, 39. 89 Bronwyn Anne Leebaw, ‘The Irreconcilable Goals of Transitional Justice’, Human Rights Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2008): 107. 90 Judith Renner, ‘A Discourse Theoretical Approach to Transitional Justice Ideals: Conceptualising “Reconciliation” as an Empty Universal in Times of Political Transition’, in Palmer et al., Critical Perspectives in Transitional Justice, 56. 91 Elizabeth Kiss, ‘Moral Ambitions with and beyond Political Constraints: Reflections on Restorative Justice’, in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 72. 92 Arthur, ‘Indigenous Self-Determination and Political Rights’, 37. 93 For further discussion of this policy framework see Sarah Maddison, ‘Indigenous Autonomy Matters: What's Wrong with the Australian Government's “Intervention” in Aboriginal communities’, Australian Journal of Human Rights 14, no. 1 (2008): 41–61, inter alia. 94 Leebaw, ‘The Irreconcilable Goals of Transitional Justice’, 113. 95 Ibid. 96 Arthur, ‘Indigenous Self-Determination and Political Rights’, 43, 44. 97 Bashir Bashir and Will Kymlicka, ‘Introduction: Struggles for Inclusion and Reconciliation in Modern Democracies’, in The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 15. 98 Woolford, ‘Genocide, Affirmative Repair’, 143. 99 Bashir and Kymlicka, ‘Introduction’, 15.100 Jung, ‘Canada and the Legacy of the Indian Residential Schools’, 242.101 Bell, ‘Transitional Justice’, 10.102 Ibid., 11.103 Paige Arthur, ‘Introduction: Identities in Transition’, in Arthur, Identities in Transition, 11.104 Jung, ‘Canada and the Legacy of the Indian Residential Schools’, 231.105 Arthur, ‘Introduction’, 9.Additional informationNotes on contributorsSarah MaddisonSarah Maddison is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research is concerned with indigenous political culture, reconciliation and conflict transformation, agonism and dialogue. Her most recent publications include Beyond White Guilt (2011) and Unsettling the Settler State (2011). In 2009, Sarah was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to examine international models of indigenous representation in Canada and the United States. Her current fellowship project is a four-country comparative study of dialogue and conflict transformation in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Guatemala and Australia.Laura J. ShepherdLaura J. Shepherd is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She works at the intersection of gendered global politics, critical approaches to security and International Relations theory. Laura is the author/editor of five books, including Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice (London: Zed, 2008) and Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories (London: Routledge, 2013). Laura has published many scholarly articles in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Review of International Studies and Journal of Gender Studies.
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