Periodic Reporting for period 4 - JUSTINT (Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding: From Static to Dynamic Discourses across National, Ethnic, Gender and Age Groups )
Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-08-31
One of the main challenges of our times is to understand how people can address the legacy of inter-ethnic violence and reconcile. Scholars and practitioners have put faith in post-conflict transitional justice, that encompasses different ways in which states and societies address past wrongs, such as war crimes trials or truth and reconciliation commissions. Transitional justice is expected to lead to restoring of inter-ethnic relations torn by conflict and to advance peace-building. However, they have been confronted with the limitations of these transitional justice practices. Instead of promoting peace and reconciliation, transitional justice practices have often had the opposite impact: they have further divided ethnic communities, distorted the truth about suffering, and traumatised rather than dignified the victims. It is important to produce robust evidence for claims about the effects of transitional justice, and identify conditions under which transitional justice practices can promote or, alternatively, undermine peace-building. The JUSTINT project provides a novel way of analysing how post-conflict justice practices advance or hinder peace-building by studying an interactive and dynamic aspect of discourse. Until now, we have relied on statements by politicians, civil society actors or victims to understand their response to post-conflict justice, and studied them as static discourses. JUSTINT turns to the study of communicative exchanges to understand how discussions about the violent past unfold, and to what effect. The JUSTINT project innovates in the field of transitional justice by studying discourse at the level of words and conversational sequences. Quantitative and qualitative methods are applied to interactions in face-to-face and virtual deliberative domains (courts, parliaments, civil society debates, and in social media) in four former Yugoslav countries: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia.
In the first reporting period, the main achievement of the JUSTINT project to date is the generation of insights that break new ground in the field of post-conflict peace-building, owing to the combination of theoretical innovation, the creation of new data, and application of new methods in this field.
Since the start of the grant period parallel efforts were invested in further refinement and operationalisation of theoretical questions and intense work on creating different types of primary data, which are needed in order to carry out the sequential analysis of discourse.
Importantly, the JUSTINT team has tested the analytic potential of the concept of justice interactions and proved the feasibility of empirical investigation of the foundational premise of the research programme that communicative exchanges should be a novel unit of analysis. This approach signals a radical innovation in the field that has approached discourse statically as statements by various actors. At the same time, JUSTINT’s focus on interactions has revealed novel pathways to peace-building through engagement with the legacy of mass atrocity both by identifying constraints on actors, and dynamics associated with repair of inter-ethnic relations.
In line with the objectives of the project to investigate interactions in different deliberative domains, the members of the JUSTINT team have begun to interrogate the communicative exchanges empirically in informal face-to-face interactions, in formal institutional domains of parliaments and courts, and, comparatively, in face-to-face and virtual domains. Intense efforts have been made by members of the JUSTINT research team to create new data (textual corpora and datasets), which are uniquely suited for the sequential analysis of discourse. This has been accomplished by collecting and pre-processing large volumes of publicly available data, by coding naturally-occurring textual data, and by conducting focus groups and interviews in the field sites.
The JUSTINT team’s ability to deliver on the project’s objectives owes to the methods training which has been conducted in this reporting period and which was tailored to equip team members with skills to conduct this novel analysis of discourse.
Lastly, the JUSTINT team have begun to disseminate their research findings and share insights with academic and non-academic audiences.
Since the start of the grant period parallel efforts were invested in further refinement and operationalisation of theoretical questions and intense work on creating different types of primary data, which are needed in order to carry out the sequential analysis of discourse.
Importantly, the JUSTINT team has tested the analytic potential of the concept of justice interactions and proved the feasibility of empirical investigation of the foundational premise of the research programme that communicative exchanges should be a novel unit of analysis. This approach signals a radical innovation in the field that has approached discourse statically as statements by various actors. At the same time, JUSTINT’s focus on interactions has revealed novel pathways to peace-building through engagement with the legacy of mass atrocity both by identifying constraints on actors, and dynamics associated with repair of inter-ethnic relations.
In line with the objectives of the project to investigate interactions in different deliberative domains, the members of the JUSTINT team have begun to interrogate the communicative exchanges empirically in informal face-to-face interactions, in formal institutional domains of parliaments and courts, and, comparatively, in face-to-face and virtual domains. Intense efforts have been made by members of the JUSTINT research team to create new data (textual corpora and datasets), which are uniquely suited for the sequential analysis of discourse. This has been accomplished by collecting and pre-processing large volumes of publicly available data, by coding naturally-occurring textual data, and by conducting focus groups and interviews in the field sites.
The JUSTINT team’s ability to deliver on the project’s objectives owes to the methods training which has been conducted in this reporting period and which was tailored to equip team members with skills to conduct this novel analysis of discourse.
Lastly, the JUSTINT team have begun to disseminate their research findings and share insights with academic and non-academic audiences.
JUSTINT is a pioneering study of the effects of post-conflict justice that arise from people’s interactions about the legacy of violence. The JUSTINT team have made significant progress towards achieving the goals of the project.
Theoretical contribution: JUSTINT has developed a theoretical argument for understanding the effects of transitional justice by foregrounding communicative interactions which provide a novel way of evaluating peace-building.
Empirical contribution: JUSTINT has been working on a number of innovative and ground-breaking papers, currently in different stages of development, alongside ongoing work on research monographs. This body of work focusing on the micro-level of interactions in formal and informal, face-to-face and virtual deliberative domains demonstrates how the goals of transitional justice in terms of repair of inter-ethnic relations can be advanced or blocked when interactants engage with the legacies of conflict both across ethnic lines and within their own ethnic groups. Select examples of the JUSTINT team’s original perspectives, supported with empirical evidence, are studies of acknowledgement, cognitive dissonance, and silence-breaking by women victims of war-time sexual and gender-based violence.
Methodological contribution: The Principal Investigator (PI) and the JUSTINT team have advanced the JUSTINT research programme with a combination of their methodological and language expertise required for the delivery of the project’s goals. They have applied computer-assisted quantitative text analysis (QTA), which is a probabilistic study of discourse aimed at identifying patterns in large volumes of textual data, and conversation analysis (CA), a methodology for the study of interactional features of talk at the micro-level of interactions. The team have innovated methodologically by introducing these methods to the study of transitional justice whilst harnessing fully their potential to generate new insights as well as by combining them in novel ways to conduct quantitative analyses of content as well as within a mixed-method qualitative and quantitative research design and in multi-modal qualitative analyses of discourse.
Policy contribution: JUSTINT’s research has already attracted attention of practitioners working in post-conflict peace-building and in transitional justice in the Balkans and globally. JUSTINT’s findings have proved to be of interest both to practitioners working in the civil society sector as well as to policy-makers in international and supranational institutions, such as the European Union. In particular, new findings produced by the JUSTINT project point to concrete policy recommendations concerning spaces conducive to reconciliation through inter-ethnic interactions or strategies to empower actors to wield influence in transitional justice policy formation (e.g. women’s role in transitional justice). Although JUSTINT’s empirical research is focused on the Balkans, the policy implications have been of interest to practitioners working in post-conflict zones around the globe.
Theoretical contribution: JUSTINT has developed a theoretical argument for understanding the effects of transitional justice by foregrounding communicative interactions which provide a novel way of evaluating peace-building.
Empirical contribution: JUSTINT has been working on a number of innovative and ground-breaking papers, currently in different stages of development, alongside ongoing work on research monographs. This body of work focusing on the micro-level of interactions in formal and informal, face-to-face and virtual deliberative domains demonstrates how the goals of transitional justice in terms of repair of inter-ethnic relations can be advanced or blocked when interactants engage with the legacies of conflict both across ethnic lines and within their own ethnic groups. Select examples of the JUSTINT team’s original perspectives, supported with empirical evidence, are studies of acknowledgement, cognitive dissonance, and silence-breaking by women victims of war-time sexual and gender-based violence.
Methodological contribution: The Principal Investigator (PI) and the JUSTINT team have advanced the JUSTINT research programme with a combination of their methodological and language expertise required for the delivery of the project’s goals. They have applied computer-assisted quantitative text analysis (QTA), which is a probabilistic study of discourse aimed at identifying patterns in large volumes of textual data, and conversation analysis (CA), a methodology for the study of interactional features of talk at the micro-level of interactions. The team have innovated methodologically by introducing these methods to the study of transitional justice whilst harnessing fully their potential to generate new insights as well as by combining them in novel ways to conduct quantitative analyses of content as well as within a mixed-method qualitative and quantitative research design and in multi-modal qualitative analyses of discourse.
Policy contribution: JUSTINT’s research has already attracted attention of practitioners working in post-conflict peace-building and in transitional justice in the Balkans and globally. JUSTINT’s findings have proved to be of interest both to practitioners working in the civil society sector as well as to policy-makers in international and supranational institutions, such as the European Union. In particular, new findings produced by the JUSTINT project point to concrete policy recommendations concerning spaces conducive to reconciliation through inter-ethnic interactions or strategies to empower actors to wield influence in transitional justice policy formation (e.g. women’s role in transitional justice). Although JUSTINT’s empirical research is focused on the Balkans, the policy implications have been of interest to practitioners working in post-conflict zones around the globe.