The performance and persistence of transitional justice and its ways of knowing atrocity
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0010836720965994 |
| Author | Briony Jones |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836720965994
Cooperation and Conflict
2021, Vol. 56(2) 163 –180
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836720965994
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The performance and
persistence of transitional
justice and its ways of
knowing atrocity
Briony Jones
Abstract
Transitional justice, like other peacebuilding endeavours, strives to create change in the world and
to produce knowledge that is useful. However, the politics of how this knowledge is produced,
shared and rendered legitimate depends upon the relationships between different epistemic
communities, the way in which transitional justice has developed as a field and the myriad contexts
in which it is embedded at local, national and international levels. In particular, forms of ‘expert’
knowledge tend to be legal, foreign and based on models to be replicated elsewhere. Work on
epistemic communities of peacebuilding can be usefully brought to bear on transitional justice,
speaking to current debates in the literature on positionality, justice from below, marginalisation
and knowledge imperialism. This article offers two contributions to the field of transitional
justice: (1) an analysis of the way the field has developed as an epistemic community(ies) and the
relevance of this for a politics of knowledge; and (2) an argument for the politics of knowledge
to be more widely discussed and understood as a factor in shaping transitional justice policy and
practice, and as a call to a more ethical relationship with the supposed beneficiaries of transitional
justice interventions.
Keywords
Transitional justice, epistemic community, peacebuilding, knowledge, expertise
Introduction: Transitional justice as peacebuilding
In sum, the technical assistance approach to transitional justice encourages de-politicized and
de-contextualized engagements. It defines expertise as professionalized and internationally
mobile knowledge rather than knowledge that is situated in activist commitments and
knowledge of local context; it favours models that are already legible to the field and its ‘best
Corresponding author:
Briony Jones, Politics and International Studies Department, University of Warwick, Social Sciences Building,
Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: B.Jones.5@warwick.ac.uk
965994CAC0010.1177/0010836720965994Cooperation and ConflictJones
research-article2020
Article
164 Cooperation and Conflict 56(2)
practices’, rather than innovations that may extend or challenge the field as we know it. (Nesiah,
2016: 34, cited in McAuliffe, 2017: 180)
Transitional justice, like other peacebuilding endeavours, strives to create change in the
world and to produce knowledge that is useful (Goetschel and Pfluger, 2014: 55).
However, the politics of this knowledge has received relatively little attention, despite its
effect on how we conceptualise transitional justice and what we even imagine to be pos-
sible in policy and practice. Drawing on scholarship that signals the importance of epis-
temic communities in peacebuilding and intervention (Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu,
2014), as well as their operation as ‘sites of a constant struggle over how to define which
qualifies as valid knowledge’ (Bush and Duggan, 2014: 233), this article explores the
conceptual, practical and ethical implications of transitional justice’s ways of knowing
atrocity. These ways of knowing – incorporating the struggles over what constitutes valid
knowledge – are the ‘politics of knowledge’ to which I refer in the article. It encapsulates
power relations between different epistemic actors, the structures in which they operate
and the tensions between idealism and pragmatism. Bringing together important threads
in transitional justice literature, the analysis presents a particular politics of knowledge
characterising the field, unpicks its implications and suggests key principles for the
future of the field.
The quote selected to open this article encapsulates the critical thinking on transi-
tional justice of which I speak. Identifying a preference for certain types of knowledge
within transitional justice, Nesiah draws our attention to the implications of this for who
can be a transitional justice ‘expert’, the quality or usefulness of the knowledge and the
way in which this politics of knowledge is able to reproduce itself, marginalising other
ways of knowing and therefore other ways of doing. In a similar way, the analysis of this
article is not focused on the certainly important questions of knowledge transfer and
knowledge translation that have occupied many peace studies scholars. Instead, I wish to
take a step back and reflect on how the politics of knowledge production shapes what is
considered to be possible in the practice and policy domains of activity. By the term the
‘politics of knowledge production’, I refer to the processes by which knowledge comes
to be regarded as such, a process of defining what counts as knowledge. This politics of
knowledge production is part of, and produced by, the politics of knowledge described
above and elaborated further in the article.
Any discussion of transitional justice and its ways of knowing atrocity needs to be
contextualised in an appreciation of the evolution of the field. Transitional justice, as the
sum of processes and mechanisms intended to address mass human rights violations of the
past, has risen to prominence in international policy making as an automatic and indeed
necessary response in these contexts (Subotić, 2012). Nagy has written of the ‘global
project’ of transitional justice, meaning that it has a ‘three-dimensional landscape. . ..
local, national global. . .within broader processes of globalisation’; and that there is a set-
tled consensus that ‘there can be no lasting peace without some kind of accounting’ (2008:
276). Its crystallisation in United Nations pillars of the right to truth, the right to justice,
the right to reparation and guarantee of non-recurrence, which are protected by Special
Rapporteurs, reflects a bureaucratisation of transitional justice (Rubli, 2012) and both its
material and discursive dominance in reckoning with violent pasts. Transitional justice
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