{"id":8005,"date":"2023-01-10T18:53:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-10T17:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frient.de\/?p=8005"},"modified":"2024-12-06T14:48:37","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T13:48:37","slug":"transitional-justice-a-call-for-decolonisation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/artikel\/transitional-justice-a-call-for-decolonisation\/","title":{"rendered":"Transitional Justice. A Call for Decolonisation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Transitional Justice is part of the colonial order, it persists and is deeply embedded in \u2018Euro- North American \u2013 centric modernity\u2019. Even when transitional justice initiatives are comprehensive and holistic, they account for a colonial situation only to a limited extent, representing more compromises and easier \u2018fixes.\u2019 They, thus, address symptoms rather than causes; and the redress (if any) is not proportionate to the crimes perpetrated by colonisers.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It might seem natural that the field, which focuses on how societies deal with the past abuse and violence, would examine the legacies of colonial crimes and structures. Transitional justice remains relatively immune to decolonial disposition, so \u2018the elephant in the room\u2019 has not been noticed. It could be because transitional justice, although an interdisciplinary field, is still much influenced by its counterpart international law. Much of the current international law architecture arose after the unbearable suffering brought by the World War II, with a view to never repeat it again. This notwithstanding, the victor\u2019s justice successfully distracted attention from the responsibility of European and other states for colonialism.

To give an example of the system\u2019s complicity in colonialism, one does not need go far. One of the six bodies of the UN – the Trusteeship Council still remains, although no longer functional, the main goal of which was to supervise European colonial territories. Like an atavism of the system, the Trusteeship Council silently and uncomfortably plays roles of both witness and evidence of colonialism and international legal order built on it, on which fields like transitional justice rely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A settler colony remains a settler colony<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just like is the case with the international structures, the fall of colonial administration in different parts of the world did not result in the fall of colonial order, it persisted, and it is deeply embedded in \u2018Euro- North American \u2013 centric modernity<\/strong><\/a>\u2019 The violence committed in the aftermath of colonial administration and the foreign and artificial colonial structures are addressed by transitional justice institutions symptomatically, without considering how colonial dynamics allowed for the structures that led to violence in the first place. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa examined apartheid policies without paying due regard to the colonial roots of apartheid. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda prosecuted the perpetrators of genocide, with no regard for the colonial administration that divided the population on ethnic principles that later led to the atrocities. Even if transitional justice tools are applied, violence is addressed, some form of justice and regime consolidation are achieved, still, in many contexts,\u00a0\u2018<\/strong>the settler colony remains a settler colony<\/strong><\/a>.\u2019<\/strong>

To say that transitional justice is free of post-colonial concerns would be inaccurate. The Belgian Parliament in 2020 established a Special Parliamentary Commission on \u2018truth and reconciliation,\u2019\u00a0to examine the country\u2019s colonial past in, Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda<\/strong><\/a>. The Commission has a broad and rather ambitious mandate in a short period of time to examine the colonial crimes from 1885 to 1962. Due to its nature and its mandate, the Commission is at risk of contributing to epistemic injustice due to omission of voices even though its impact could\u00a0have far-reaching consequences<\/strong><\/a>. In June 2022, the Belgian King Philippe \u2018expressed regret\u2019 for the colonial harm; and the country\u2019s\u00a0Prime Minister apologised for Belgium\u2019s responsibility<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0for the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. In May 2021, Germany officially apologised for the massacre of Herero and Nama in Namibia that happened over a century ago, using for the first time, the term \u2018genocide\u2019 and offering\u00a0to provide developmental aid as a form of reparation<\/strong><\/a>. Transitional justice has also been used to address harms inflicted on indigenous populations, for example, relating to Indian Residential Schools in Canada and care institutions in Australia, where children were forced to study in a different language, adopt foreign cultural practices, and be\u00a0separated from family and community<\/strong><\/a>. Such measures as inquiring on the events (truth dimension of transitional justice), reparations, public apologies were in place with respect to the settlers\u2019 policies towards indigenous populations in Australia and New Zealand, with a Waitangi Tribunal settling the disputes concerning land claims\u00a0of M\u0101ori people<\/strong><\/a>. Even if these initiatives are laudable, they account for a colonial situation only to a limited extent, representing more compromises and easier \u2018fixes,\u2019 which are not proportionate to the crimes perpetrated by colonisers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rethink the rethinking<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The above issues force us to make the following points: we need to (again) rethink the state of the field of transitional justice and its aims. Importantly, and this has been done only marginally, we need to consider the state of knowledge production in transitional justice. This means reflecting on who the agents of the creation of transitional justice norms are. The focus in transitional justice should be shifted towards \u2018amplifying the wealth of knowledges available within traditionally subaltern, non-dominant, and largely disregarded epistemologies of the global South that currently face destruction or, what Bonaventura de\u00a0Sousa Santos terms, \u201cepistemicide.<\/a>\u201d\u2019 We also need to ask ourselves, what is the essence of the field, how do we challenge the existent geographical imbalance when it comes to transitional justice case studies, how do we think about non-Western imperialism, and, in the words of Walter Mignolo, \u2018how do we rethink the rethinking\u2019?<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0We should acknowledge that European modernity is not the threshold with which the \u2018progress\u2019 is measured, and it is not (only) Europe that shapes global justice agenda. \u2018Post-colonial\u2019 (description of the situation) needs to be changed into \u2018decolonial\u2019 (programme for action).

Transitional justice should engage and foster understanding of the genealogies of decolonial thought in order not to enter the trope ofhijacking the term because it is fashionable<\/strong><\/a>. A superficial adoption of the language of decolonisation serves solely for the purposes of addressing the settler\u2019s guilt and needs, and,\u00a0as a result, hinders the possibility of decolonisation<\/strong><\/a>. The \u2018decolonizing projects and other social justice projects\u2019 are incommensurable as the work of decolonisation is both\u00a0\u2018hard\u2019 and \u2018unsettling<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong>\u2019 Just as the decolonisation of academia cannot be achieved by merely including a few names of authors of colour in reading lists in order to \u2018decolonise\u2019 the curriculums, transitional justice cannot be \u2018decolonised\u2019 in a true meaning of the word by including a few indigenous approaches into an otherwise liberal and externally-driven package of measures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The decolonising mindset refrains from the imposition of the standards of modernity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question of land repatriation, wealth distribution, and structural violence has received much attention in the literature on transitional justice but what is missing is that this should be done with a decolonising mindset and praxis, that is, the return of what is owed, and non-imposition of the standards of modernity. As was coined by Fanon,\u00a0\u2018Decolonisation never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being\u2026<\/strong><\/a>\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Acknowledgements<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This contribution was written as part of the research project ‘Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict ‘ [grant number 01UG2205A], funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This contribution is based on a chapter entitled \u2018Towards Decolonial Agenda for Transitional Justice: \u2018The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born,\u2019 forthcoming in Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan and Amritha V. Shenoy (eds.), The Wretched of the Global South (Springer Publishers).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Transitional Justice is part of the colonial order, it persists and is deeply embedded in \u2018Euro- North American \u2013 centric modernity\u2019. Even when transitional justice initiatives are comprehensive and holistic, they account for a colonial situation only to a limited extent, representing more compromises and easier \u2018fixes.\u2019 They, thus, address symptoms rather than causes; and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":8006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,830],"tags":[831],"autor":[1000],"blog-serie":[304,458],"fokusthema":[],"organisation":[134,695],"region":[],"thema_artikel":[889],"class_list":["post-8005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-unkategorisiert","category-unkategorisiert-2","tag-blog","autor-dr-selbi-durdiyeva-en","blog-serie-4-transitional-justice","blog-serie-transitional-justice","organisation-universitaet-marburg","organisation-universitat-marburg","thema_artikel-decolonisation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8008,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8005\/revisions\/8008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"autor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/autor?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"blog-serie","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog-serie?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"fokusthema","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/fokusthema?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"organisation","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/organisation?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=8005"},{"taxonomy":"thema_artikel","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/frient.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thema_artikel?post=8005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}