Justice Visions

• Queering Transitional Justice

  This new episode zooms in on the invisibilization of certain voices in transitional justice discourse and practice, namely LGBTQIA+ and children’s perspectives, whose lives and experiences have been excluded from most formal and informal transitional justice initiatives. Our guests, Pascha Bueno-Hansen and Caitlin Biddolph, both conduct research on transitional justice issues from LGBTQIA+, intersectional and decolonial perspectives. Pascha, associate professor at the University of Delaware, works on LGBTQIA+ mobilization and resistance in defense of human rights in Latin America. Caitlin, a lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, spoke about one strand of her research that focuses on queering childhood in global transitional justice governance.Both scholars touch upon how LGBTQIA +, intersectional, and decolonial approaches help problematize and unsettle some of the current assumptions and challenges in transitional justice.Pascha foregrounds that both the gender and sex binary, as well as the temporally bounded nature of transitional justice, limit our understanding of structural and historical violence against certain populations. This is clear for example, in the erasure of the lived experiences of the LGBTQIA+ community from transitional justice initiatives. Caitlin focuses on the paternalistic and protectionist nature of global transitional justice governance that tends to depict (queer) children as passive victims stripping their agency away and thus reproducing power hierarchies. They both see opportunities in local intergenerational spaces to dismantle these discourses and practices. Through examples from Latin America, Pascha reflects how artivism paved the way to include LGBTQIA+ issues in transitional justice mechanisms. She also stresses how “younger generations have done such an incredible job of making inroads into inclusive language and preferred gender pronouns. And that is something that the older generations struggle with comprehending”.  Intergenerational dialogues can make global transitional justice more inclusive; Caitlin emphasizes too. She sees this as an opportunity to “stitching together stories across temporalities… of trying to put together the fabric of a country so that we have a more rich and ongoing narrative about injustice and violence and atrocity”. In her view, this has the potential of destabilizing power hierarchies present in global transitional justice institutions and turn them into dialogical and relational processes.

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  36:40
• Victim Participation as Labor

  In this new episode we zoom in on an oft-overlooked dimension of victim participation in formal transitional justice processes, namely the labor that victims invest in justice processes. In a conversation with professor Leila Ulrich, we explore the intricate relationship between the ICC’s engagement with victims and the global capitalist systems in which the court operates. The dynamics of under-valorization of victims time-investment, the offloading of care work to local and gendered practitioners, and the invisibilization of victims’ contributions to formal justice processes, characterize many international justice processes, Leila argues. Therefore, it is crucial to acknowledge and make this work politically visible as labor. Foregrounding the knowledge, resources, and time people dedicate allows us to acknowledge their contributions and better understand the depth of their involvement. "[T]here is a lot of tension between those who work and those who don't work in the same way that there's a lot of tension between those who are recognised as victims and those who are not. So there's a lot of complexities and paradoxes involved in how victim participation functions." In this new episode, Tine Destrooper is joined by co-host Kim Baudewijns, who recently became a member of the Justice Visions' team, doing research on TJ processes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kim’s work situates this conversation in the broader landscape of justice initiatives: standardized and informal, local and international, judicial and non-judicial, etc. This inspires a reflection on how victims’ roles alter across these various justice sites.

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  33:26
• Victim Leadership and Mobilization in Turkey and Tunisia

  We kick off this new season of the Justice Visions podcast with a set of conversations that we initiated during the recent Justice Visions Conference, exploring victim participation, mobilization, and resistance within the realm of transitional justice. In this first episode of these miniseries, we shed light on victims driving transitional justice efforts in Turkey and Tunisia.Our guests, Dr. Sélima Kebaili and Dr. Güneş Daşlı, both focus in their research on women survivors in contexts of conflict. Sélima, a senior lecturer at the University of Geneva, touches on the marginalization of female survivors in the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission and how survivors sought to overcome this. Güneş, a research fellow at Loughborough University, speaks of the mobilization of members of the Saturday Mothers who seek justice for enforced disappearances and crimes committed by Turkish state forces and paramilitaries.Both scholars unpack the nuances of labels such as “leaders” and “victims”. Sélima explains that while “victim leadership” might make sense in terms of underlining the important role victims play in driving transitional justice efforts, we have to be mindful of the label when applying it in the context of movements, as it runs the risk of defining certain victims as leaders and pushing others into more passive identities. Many women assert their agency beyond the public realm, and a discourse of leadership may render their actions invisible.Güneş points to the ways in which in Turkey survivors and family members use the labels of victim and survivor flexibly and how they navigate multiple identities. Starting their justice activism as relatives of the disappeared, they often evolve into human rights defenders, political actors, or lawyers, embracing multiple roles that sustain their resistance and resilience.In both cases, acknowledging a diversity of experiences, identities and approaches is crucial, since rebuilding identities after extreme violence is a very delicate process. As Sélima notes, "It doesn’t always require a grand gesture, and often it unfolds through more modest everyday forms of reparation, like returning to work, reconnecting with others, and restoring a social life." In the absence of an official transitional justice process in Turkey, groups like the Saturday Mothers have for nearly 30 years led informal efforts for legal accountability, memory work, and truth recovery. Güneş emphasizes that victims maintain a long-term perspective and are not dissuaded by the apparent lack of hope: "We know that there is no hope now, but we continue. We are going to archive. We are going to focus on what we do now. But when the time comes, we are going to act."

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  27:25
• Re-imagining Memorialization and Documentation in Afghanistan

  The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this third episode of the miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization and documentation efforts in Afghanistan, and reflect on the merits of arts-based approaches, as well as the challenges posed by such approaches.Sophia Bijleveld Milosevic is a member of AHRDO, an Afghan human rights organization that uses a transformative, victim-oriented approach. Their work aims to document human rights violations for judicial purposes while also telling victims' stories in a way that reflects their lived experiences, among others via art-based approaches. Through the Memory Box initiative, AHRDO collected over 15.000 personal items of war victims, creating a space for individual and collective memorialization in Afghanistan. "We felt it was important to continue to share these testimonies and to continue to advocate for victims", states Sophia. "In the Afghan context, memorialization can be considered as a form of symbolic reparation and a way of acknowledging the stories of the victims." To leverage their expertise in documentation, and launch an online platform, AHRDO partnered with HURIDOCS.HURIDOCS is an organization specializing in archival and documentation practices in the domain of human Rights. Its documentalist, Bono Olgado talks about how the victim-centred and arts-based practices of AHRDO challenged his organization to revisit its existing archival practice, and how memory and memorialization are understood. "When we are talking about creating a platform or a database that would reflect these art-based approaches, then we would need a different form of expertise, which is quite challenging because we're technically creating counter-epistemologies to existing practises of documentation." Initiatives such as the Memory Box and art-based methodologies, Bono stresses, reconfigure our understanding of documentation and data. "The challenge is to design technologies that actually support this new set of methodologies as opposed to flattening them."

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  28:56
• Stitching Memories: Embroidery in Shatila

  The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this second episode of these miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization efforts through embroidery practices in Shatila camp in Beirut. Since the increasing repression by the Assad regime and the war in Syria, there has been a large influx of refugees into Shatila, originally a Palestinian refugee camp. Our colleague Sofie Verclyte recently defended her PhD project ‘Migrating heritage’, and developed a co-creative project with women in Shatila. In that project, she explored the role of embroidery practices in the context of conflict and displacement. Tine De Strooper and Brigitte Herremans spoke to Sofie about the practice of embroidery, and how it has been used in the Syrian context, as a way to remember, and an important element in the broader struggle for justice. While embroidery might not seem directly reconcilable with a struggle for justice, it has a long history of narrating lived experiences. There are many instances where practitioners use their skill to remember and transmit lived experiences of harm. As Sofie highlights: “this is also the case in Shatila, where embroidery, rooted in the region’s rich textile tradition, plays a central role in the lives of makers, typically women.” Traditionally, these women often passed down their craft through intergenerational mentorship, often as a form of storytelling. As such, embroidery is a way to transmit knowledge, to express lived experiences, and therefore also a way to preserve memories and to prevent forgetting. As Boushra, one of the artists with whom Sofie worked states: “For me, embroidery is a revival of memory. It prevents me from forgetting the experiences I went through, such as war, displacement and being a refugee. Often experiences are harsh, whether due to war, displacement, or life circumstances.” Boushra emphasizes that she sees embroidery as a form of communication, a language for sharing experiences. This perspective highlights the significance of nonverbal practices in capturing and conveying experiences of harm. In a context where formal memorialization initiatives are absent because of the ongoing injustices and the context of the entrenched non-transition, informal memorialization efforts can be seen as a way to express, share, and resist memories of injustice. These private practices preserve unarchived and previously unrecorded memories, but also, and often simultaneously, they make it possible to imagine a more just future.

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