By seeking justice via courts and truth commissions, emphasis is usually put on high-level perpetrators. It tends to be forgotten, however, that also national-level violence and its consequences are lived on a local dimension in cities and neighborhoods. While remembering might be practiced nationally, locally, practices of silence can persist. Which steps need to be taken by practitioners of development and peacebuilding to complement national TJ processes and advance this emerging agenda?

Transitional Justice is, little by little, addressing the question of territory and locality. It is quite clear that injustice can be demonstrated in geography: civilians are forcibly displaced from their region, lands are taken by force, neighborhoods and towns are divided by invisible lines of ethnicity, class, religion and, possibly, violence. We usually see transitional justice as “dealing with the past”: an activity that tackles the elusive concept of time through memory and redress. But violence occurs somewhere: our existence is situated in a physical, geographic scenario.

Violence is Lived Locally

Consider the following examples:

In the 1960s, Cape Town authorities decided to raze District Six, a vibrant neighborhood occupied by South Asian and Black communities, and turn it into a Whites Only area. The 60,000 inhabitants were relocated to the outskirts of the city, the houses were bulldozed. This act of urbicide was not included in the mandate of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, since the TRC looked into crimes against persons, such as killings and torture, but not acts like this, which constituted the day-to-day essence of Apartheid.

60 years later, Colombia´s Truth Commission recognized that the river Atrato, in the predominantly Black region of Chocó, was used as an immense mass grave as violent groups discarded the bodies of their victims in its waters. The river, said commissioner Ángela Salazar had a wounded soul and needed rituals for healing. In its reasoning, the truth commission converged with the country’s Constitutional Court, which had previously declared that the Atrato is “a rights-holder entity” entitled to protection against the pollution created by illegal mining.

What we tend to see as national-level periods of violence and their corresponding processes of justice, is lived at the local dimension in the intersection of territory, bodies and culture. Concepts like peace-building, reconciliation, justice, truth-telling or memory are lived in a specific way in neighborhoods and towns. A country may seek justice and truth through courts and truth commissions, usually focusing on high-level perpetrators. Regrettably, this often means that at the local level impunity is maintained and resentment brews.

Examining the Past

The same happens with memory: official practices of remembering may coexist with local practices of silence. I remember a movie about Germany’s treatment of the past that impressed me enormously: a student investigates the Nazi past of her town, an activity that has been legally sanctioned by the country’s highest authorities, but that is completely taboo in her tight community. What is a prestigious, noble enterprise of memory at the national level is shunned upon in the little town, as troublemaking.

Transitional justice practice tends to be local also because, sometimes, it is easier to build consensus about examining the past in the local community, before the national authorities are willing to do so, or to complement national processes that are seen as insufficient on their own. There are dozens of local truth commissions and reparations bodies in cities and states of the U.S. because there is little chance of a national transitional justice process. In Brazil there was a National Truth Commission, and there are national processes of reparation, but states, cities, unions and universities created 29 local truth commissions to complement the national process.

Once, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, a professor at the university told me that the Law Faculty wanted to establish its own truth commission. I was surprised by the extreme specificity of the idea and asked why would they need one. His answer was “our faculty provided three ministers to the military dictatorship. We need to know why.” We live in the capillarity of the social organism, in the dense interactions of our institutions, culture, and mental maps. It shouldn´t be a surprise, I learned then, that seeking justice should be equally capillary and detailed.

The Local Dimension as a Key Element of Transitional Justice

The local and territorial dimension, then, is a key element of transitional justice in at least three forms: (a) a strictly geographic one, as conflict takes place because of attempts to control territory, and peace will not be sustainable without addressing territorial justice, (b) a political one, as transitional justice priorities at the national level do not translate easily into the local level, and (c) an epistemological one, as accurate knowledge of the conflict is impossible without understanding the experiences at the local level.

Practitioners of development and peacebuilding, therefore, need to ensure support to local and community based TJ efforts. A few examples of initiatives to support include processes to return stolen land and facilitate the return of refugees or displaced persons, community-based memory projects, and projects recognizing the linkage between atrocity and environmental harm. This is an emerging, but essential agenda.