Foregrounding the 'Local': Place-based Approaches to Transitional Justice

• Published in: The international journal of transitional justice 2012-07, Vol.6 (2), p.374-382
• Main Authors: De Vos, C. M., Kendall, S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Case studies; Criminal courts; Interventionism; Judicial process; Justice; Universalism
• ISSN: 1752-7716; 1752-7724
• DOI: 10.1093/ijtj/ijs005

Scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of transitional justice has increasingly acknowledged the need to look beyond large institutional structures to more locally driven initiatives and informal mechanisms. Considering that some forms of justice may appear to be externally imposed and distant from the standpoint of conflict-affected populations, some recent work has sought to describe alternative mechanisms that have developed alongside or in lieu of such large-scale retributive institutions as the ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or the permanent International Criminal Court. Such scholarship also attempts to shift the focus from transitional mechanisms themselves to their popular uptake in the contexts where they are operating. Both of the texts reviewed here consciously seek to foreground more local dimensions of postconflict processes through extensive field-based observation and interpretive methods. Phil Clark's monograph on the Rwandan gacaca process provides an extended case study of community-based justice within a broader national political context. A recent volume edited by Alexander Hinton brings together anthropological studies of transitional justice initiatives to contribute to his call for an anthropology of transitional justice, one that is more oriented to the complexities of the encounter between global/transnational mechanisms and the local realities on the ground (p. 9). As interventions in the transitional justice literature, both texts offer an interpretivist counterpoint to the rise of quantitative analyses in assessing transitional justice objectives. They also serve as critiques both implicitly and explicitly of the well-worn universalism that often accompanies transitional justice projects, as even such presumably universal desires as the rule of law have contested and context-specific meanings. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press