Project description
Theorising innovation in contemporary transitional justice practices
Transitional justice (TJ) is meant to help societies heal after grave human rights abuses. However, while the field is expanding into new and complex settings, such as ongoing conflicts or historical injustices, its current frameworks are being tested. These contemporary TJ cases do not resemble the cases that historically shaped TJ’s core ideas of justice, truth, reparation, non-recurrence and memorialisation. In this context, the ERC-funded GROUNDOC project explores how TJ is evolving in such challenging contexts. By studying experimental and ambitious TJ initiatives outside conventional models, notably in the realm of documentation, GROUNDOC aims to rethink the foundations of the field. The project seeks to better understand how justice can be pursued in places where institutional mechanisms fall short, offering insights into the future of global TJ practice.
Objective
Transitional justice (TJ) is the field of scholarship and practice that examines how societies deal with the consequences of massive human rights violations. A decade of critical TJ scholarship may create an impression of a field in crisis. Yet, TJ practice seems to be thriving: TJ language and initiatives are travelling to increasingly diverse contexts, which are often very different from those in which TJ emerged. Examples are TJ initiatives to address ongoing conflict or historical injustice. The manifestations of TJ in these ‘aparadigmatic’ cases are often so distinct that they challenge the foundation of the TJ paradigm. Notably the innovations, ambitions, and experimentation happening in these cases invite for a rethinking of TJ's standard mechanisms and objectives, which currently revolve around the pillars of justice, truth, reparation, non-recurrence and memorialisation.
This project goes beyond definitional debates over whether these processes are ‘real’ instances of TJ. Instead, I argue that properly theorizing the innovations happening in these aparadigmatic cases is crucial to close the emerging gap between theory and practice, and that it can even be a way to address some of the most pressing critiques of paradigmatic TJ.
I will use a mixed-method actor-oriented approach to analyse the practices and ambitions of grassroots justice actors in 6 aparadigmatic cases. This analysis will foreground documentation initiatives because there is significant innovation happening in this realm, and because documentation’s central role across all TJ initiatives means that this innovation has the potential to amend the entire paradigm. I will adopt an eco-systemic analytical framework to examine how (innovations in) documentary practices interact with and affect other (transitional) justice initiatives. I then build on this empirical analysis to reconstruct the TJ paradigm from the ground up. The envisioned outcome is a practice-informed & future-oriented TJ paradigm
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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9000 Gent
Belgium
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