scholarly journals The Politics of Time, Transition, and Justice in Transitional Justice

Author(s):  
Noha Aboueldahab

Abstract As transitional justice seeks to reckon with a violent past in order to build a more peaceful future, its practitioners tend to operate on the assumption that the past, present and future are distinct periods. Globally, however, as different regions and states undergo different phases of transitional justice, it is difficult to identify linear processes of transition and of justice. When understood as a fluid process, transitional justice elicits questions about how governments, judiciaries, civil society, and victims engage with it as a vehicle for political change, repression, and justice. This engagement constitutes a complex set of interactions, ebbs, and flows that take place across space and time. With the benefit of hindsight and a mosaic of transitions, this special issue aims to recognise and interrogate the centrality and complexity of time in transition, justice, and transitional justice. The authors discuss five overarching dimensions of time: the timing of transitional justice interventions, the institutionalisation of time, the compartmentalisation of time, the politicisation of time, and ways to reconcile the temporal dichotomies of various transitional justice mechanisms

2020 ◽  
pp. 175069802092145
Author(s):  
Joseph S Robinson

A large body of literature assumes post-conflict societies can and should mediate public memory towards frames conducive to a reconciled future. However, this article argues that such a drive marginalises survivors of political violence who narrate the past as still-present wounds. The linear temporality of transitional justice presumes an idealised trajectory through time, away from violence and towards reconciliation. However, this idealised temporality renders anachronistic survivors who depend on the prolongation of traumatic pasts for the possibility of political change. Using the case of former Ulster Defence Regiment in Northern Ireland, this article examines this prolongation through the lens of Ulster Defence Regiment survivors’ resistant place-memory along the Southwest run of the Irish border. Through the performative retemporalisation of everyday places and landscapes, survivors demand that their resistant memories and narrative frames of past violence still belong and still have active political resonance in transitional political space.


1995 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
César Cansino

THE MEXICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY GOING through the most turbulent, disconcerting and complex end of a sexenio, or six-year presidential term, in memory. This is not the usual internal turmoil which has traditionally accompanied every change of administration, but a political crisis so great that it portends a process of political change destined to transform the very nature of the Mexican political regime itself.It may not be altogether new for this political regime to face the ‘democratic demands’ of important sectors of civil society; these demands have been made in the past in a variety of ways and with various consequences. However, this time the call for democracy constitutes an authentic challenge to the continuity and autonomy of the regime, and this is an extraordinary, highly significant development.


Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne

The widespread complicity evident in the post-communist cases complicates approaches to transitional justice because it lays some of the blame on society. Lustration procedures use information in secret police files to shed light on the past. Those files contain information documenting how neighbors, friends, co-workers, and even relatives might have informed on you. There is a potential for such revelations about the scope of the interpersonal and institutional betrayals to undermine social trust and civil society. This chapter explores the problems associated with complicity and transitional justice measures by examining the cases of Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria. The cases highlight how historical memory is affected by negative revelations about the past. These cases illustrate how rising nostalgia can collide with truth telling, forcing the reconsideration and sometimes revision of historical memory.


2019 ◽  
Vol 101 (910) ◽  
pp. 125-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuong N. Pham ◽  
Mychelle Balthazard ◽  
Niamh Gibbons ◽  
Patrick Vinck

AbstractTransitional justice is a conspicuous feature of responses to mass atrocities. Rooted in accountability and redress for victims, transitional justice mechanisms influence and are influenced by collective memory of conflicts. This article looks at the dynamics between memory, trauma and forgiveness in Cambodia. Thirty years after the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodians expressed limited knowledge of the past, a strong desire for the truth, and lingering feelings of hatred. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) created or renewed demand for truth, along with some desire for harm to come to the wrongdoers. Although the ECCC was set up several decades after the mass atrocities, the data suggest that the ECCC and the civil society movement associated with it may have had positive outcomes on addressing the legacy of the violence.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052098052
Author(s):  
Ilker Ataç ◽  
Kim Rygiel ◽  
Maurice Stierl

Over the past years, we have seen a rise in political mobilisations in EUrope and elsewhere, by and in solidarity with migrant newcomers. This article focuses on specific examples of what we conceptualise as transversal solidarities by and with migrants, and rooted in the city, the focus of this special issue. The examples we explore in this article include: Trampoline House, a civil society organisation which provides a home to migrant newcomers in Copenhagen; Queer Base, an activist organisation in Vienna providing support for LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer) migrants; and finally, the Palermo Charter Process, a coalition of diverse groups seeking to create open harbours and ‘corridors of solidarity’, from the Mediterranean to cities throughout EUrope. While these examples are situated in and across different urban spaces, they share a common grounding in building solidarity through spaces of encounters related to ideas of home, community, and harbour. By exploring these distinct solidarity initiatives in tandem, we examine, on the one hand, how the production of spaces of encounters is linked to building transversal solidarities and, on the other, how transversal solidarities also connect different spaces of solidarity across different political scales.


2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Ortmann

In the past few years, a number of civil society coalitions have emerged in the illiberal city-state of Singapore. They are the unintended result of a controlled process of liberalization which was initiated by the government in the 1990s in response to growing demands for participation. In particular, the internet has contributed to a more assertive, independent and better organized civil society, which can be seen as a significant step in the process of political change in the city-state.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie J. Bunce ◽  
Sharon L. Wolchik

Over the past decade, a number of elections in postcommunist regimes perched between democracy and dictatorship have led to the triumph of liberal oppositions over illiberal incumbents or their anointed successors. The international diffusion of these electoral revolutions reflects the interaction among five factors: the long term development of civil society, expanded opportunities for democratic political change, the rise of collaborative networks among international democracy promoters, regional exporters of democracy and local oppositions, and, finally, careful application of an electoral approach to regime transition. The cross-national diffusion of the electoral model in this region, however, may have run its course, largely because of less supportive local and international conditions.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-124
Author(s):  
Philip L. Martin

Japan and the United States, the world’s largest economies for most of the past half century, have very different immigration policies. Japan is the G7 economy most closed to immigrants, while the United States is the large economy most open to immigrants. Both Japan and the United States are debating how immigrants are and can con-tribute to the competitiveness of their economies in the 21st centuries. The papers in this special issue review the employment of and impacts of immigrants in some of the key sectors of the Japanese and US economies, including agriculture, health care, science and engineering, and construction and manufacturing. For example, in Japanese agriculture migrant trainees are a fixed cost to farmers during the three years they are in Japan, while US farmers who hire mostly unauthorized migrants hire and lay off workers as needed, making labour a variable cost.


CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
Norbert Bugeja

In this retrospective piece, the Guest Editor of the first number of CounterText (a special issue titled Postcolonial Springs) looks back at the past five years from various scholarly and personal perspectives. He places particular focus on an event that took place mid-way between the 2011 uprisings across a number of Arab countries and the moment of writing: the March 2015 terror attack on the Bardo National Museum in Tunis, which killed twenty-two people and had a profound effect on Tunisian popular consciousness and that of the post-2011 Arab nations. In this context, the author argues for a renewed perspective on memoir as at once a memorial practice and a political gesture in writing, one that exceeds concerns of genre and form to encompass an ongoing project of political re-cognition following events that continue to remap the agenda for the region. The piece makes a brief final pitch for Europe's need to re-cognise, within those modes of ‘articulacy-in-difficulty’ active on its southern borders, specific answers to its own present quandaries.


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