Tine Destrooper
Biographic Data
| ID | 111337 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tine Destrooper |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tine |
| FAMILY NAME | Destrooper |
| SIGNATURE | DESTROOPER T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ghent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0781-2971 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 87 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Cambridge Handbook of Victim Engagement in Transitional Justice
How have victims shaped – and reshaped – transitional justice? This volume introduces a novel framework for tracing and interpreting the evolving trajectories of victim-survivor engagement across different phases of grassroots activism, institutional participation, and various forms of resistance. Drawing on a diverse range of empirical case studies from across the globe, the handbook provides both a historical analysis of victims' evolving roles…
Historical truth, accountability and change in the (post-)colonial state: An Introduction
In the past years, there has been growing attention, in Europe and beyond, for issues related to accountability for, and recognition of, (post-)colonial violence and its enduring effects, as well as more fundamental debates about the need for societal change. As former colonial powers are increasingly facing pressures to redress enduring injustices related to their colonial legacies, an oft-used response to these demands has been the creation of …
Redress for colonial harm in discourse and practice: A review of initiatives, actors, and approaches in Belgium
Since the summer of 2020, Belgium has seen a boom in institutional and civil society initiatives related to redress for the ongoing legacies of colonial violence. While some mobilise existing international, regional, and domestic legal frameworks, others do not. This article examines when, why, and how these frameworks are mobilised and how this affects collaborations. Based on an empirical mapping exercise of initiatives, actors, and approaches,…
Transitional justice and the struggle for reparations for slavery and its ongoing legacies in the United States: Joyce Hope Scott in conversation with Cira Pallí-Asperó and Tine Destrooper
As global uprisings for racial justice put questions about historical and ongoing racial injustice higher on academic, public and political agendas, transitional justice (TJ) scholars increasingly started to explore which dynamics of racial injustice might be supported by, or reflected in, the practice of TJ. These questions have mostly been addressed by critical TJ scholars, who formulate an encompassing critique regarding pitfalls of formalised…
Can human-centred participatory design turn AI into a pertinent tool for human rights research
The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered significant ethical and human rights concerns. While much of the debate focuses on risks such as discrimination, disinformation and algorithmic bias, much less has been written about AI's potential to support human rights practice and scholarship. This article engages with both perspectives, by reflecting on the early development of RedressHub, a tool that integrates AI-assisted in…
The (Many) Afterlives of Transitional Justice: Practice-based Insights on Continuity, Impact and Evolving Justice Struggles
∞ In the past decade, the paradigm of transitional justice has come under increasing scrutiny. Transitional justice scholarship has been characterized by self-reflective critiques, while on the ground even emblematic transitional justice cases have seen the (re)emergence of authoritarian tendencies, raising further questions about the paradigm’s legitimacy. Yet, in practice, a wide range of (grassroots) justice actors continue to invoke transitio…
Historical truth as a tool for decolonisation: Cira Pallí-asperó and Tine Destrooper in conversation with Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa
The legacies of colonialism continue to affect millions of people(s) to this day, and many formal and informal institutions with roots in the colonial era - often inadvertently - contribute to these injustices. In conversation with Dr Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, an assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics at the London School of Economics, we discuss the capacities of historical truth initiatives to contribute to current decolonisation eff…
Le recours à la justice transitionnelle dans les démocraties consolidées: Vers de nouvelles perspectives
La justice transitionnelle est généralement associée aux contextes de sortie de conflit ou de démocratisation. Pourtant, son langage et ses mécanismes sont de plus en plus mobilisés dans une diversité de situations, y compris au sein de démocraties consolidées, où ils servent à aborder les héritages coloniaux, les violences systémiques et les injustices historiques. Cet article analyse la manière dont les victimes et les acteurs grassroots élargi…
Visibilizing the accountability web: Ordinary courts, informal justice efforts, and alternative approaches for addressing mass human rights violations in Syria
Accountability mechanisms are often perceived as the Achilles’ heel of human rights practice. As classic human rights institutions rarely provide adequate guarantees of accountability, justice actors are increasingly turning to alternative spaces to advance accountability. This is, for example, the case in the Syrian context, where various justice actors are engaging in judicial and non‐judicial initiatives. These include extraterritorial jurisdi…
Thick accountability in contemporary justice struggles: An actor-centered reappraisal of innovations in transitional justice practice
From Protocol to Practice: Collective Reflections on Navigating Ethical Junctures in (Post-)Conflict Research
Research with victims-survivors of severe human rights violations raises complex moral and ethical dilemmas that often extend beyond the principles of do no harm and the risk avoidance and mitigation strategies prescribed by formal ethics reviews and guidelines. Yet, while the latter have been widely critiqued, extant scholarship provides little guidance for developing comprehensive ethics architectures that balance institutional demands with the…
Contextualising the absence of standardised approaches to transitional justice in the Philippines
The professionalisation, institutionalisation and standardisation of transitional justice has often been critiqued for pushing more informal, vernacular or experimental approaches off the radar. While this concern is legitimate and needs to be addressed, this article explores the continued relevance of standardised approaches, and of a shared language of transitional justice more specifically. I develop this argument against the background of rec…
Learning from the past? How the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, civil society initiatives and survivor stories shape young Cambodians’ understanding of non-recurrence
Empirical research into the communicative and didactic functions of transitional justice processes remains scarce, obscuring our understanding of their meaningfulness as message sending mechanisms and their (potential) influence on popular knowledge and beliefs. Engaging with expressivist theory, this article focusses on the Cambodian context to study how young adults perceive and interact with messages on memory, justice and 'dealing with the pa…
Disruptive Reparations? Tunisia's Victim Regions and the Collective Reparations Dilemma in Transitional Societies
In the past decade, an encompassing transitional justice process has been developed in Tunisia, which interacts with various other policy domains, including that of development. This article foregrounds three important interrelated innovations of Tunisia's transitional justice process: The explicit attention to economic crimes and violations of economic, social, and cultural rights; the introduction of the notion of victim regions; and the concep…
The Truthfulness Lies in the Process, Not the Outcome” Using Artistic Practices to Further Truth-Telling and Memorialization in the Philippines
The Philippines have never known a unified state-sanctioned narrative about the violence that happened during the Marcos dictatorship. In order to resist ongoing disinformation campaigns that seek to erase evidence and memories of past violence, various institutional and civil society actors are currently initiating interventions in the domain of truth and memorialization. Notably, artists, curators, and creative professionals are engaging in var…
Understanding the Unforeseen Consequences of an Incomplete Transitional Justice Ecology in the Philippines
The Philippines is not typically the focus of transitional justice (TJ) scholarship. Yet, it has had to deal with violent legacies pertaining to each generation of TJ and has installed several TJ initiatives in response to this. This has given rise to a densely populated TJ landscape, spanning different periods and regions and including both formal and informal initiatives within various TJ pillars. In spite of this plethora of initiatives, the P…
Exploring the Nexus between Transitional Justice and Ecoterritorial Conflict Resolution: Time for an Ecoterritorial Turn in Transformative Transitional Justice
∞ This article explores the nexus between ecoterritorial conflict resolution and transformative transitional justice, against the background of (neo)extractivism and the Peruvian case of half a century of oil violence. Our argument is twofold. On the one hand, we argue that transitional justice can act as a conceptual and analytical lens to better understand and further (claims for) change while also countering the invisibilization of ecoterritor…
Remembering Martial Law: An Eco-System of Truth Initiatives and the Emergence of Narrative Documentation in the Philippines
In the Philippines, governmental and civil society actors installed a range of mechanisms to deal with violent legacies of the Marcos regime. Formal truth-telling mechanisms were, however, not part of the early transitional justice architecture, meaning that truth-seeking initially took place as part of other justice efforts. Nonetheless, more recently, a boom in truth, documentation and memorialization processes has resulted in a dynamic eco-sys…
Literary accountability and the future of human rights protection
Human rights are increasingly described as in crisis. One reason for this is that existing legal accountability mechanisms cannot adequately deal with intricate and multilayered human rights violations that occur in vastly complex social contexts. Thus, if human rights are to continue to offer a widely accepted framework for thinking about (social) justice, we urgently need to revisit the very notion of human rights accountability in ways that al…
Disruptive accountability? Temporal regimes and social change in decolonization struggles in Belgium
To address the legacies of colonialism, several former colonial states have implemented a range of initiatives commonly considered to belong to the domain of transitional justice (TJ). These contexts are, however, very different from those for which TJ was initially conceptualized. As such, the implementation of elements from the TJ toolbox in these decolonization struggles raises several questions, which this article seeks to address. One of the…
Stitching a rights narrative: How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice
Human rights can be seen as a means to improve people's lived realities. Yet the language and practice of human rights are not always moored in these realities. What happens to the meaning of human rights when these are expressed in (partly non-verbal) ways that are deeply rooted in lived-embodied, material, and cultural-realities, and how does that practice transform ideas about rights? In this article, we describe how women from Syrian refugee …
Belgium’s “Truth Commission” on its overseas colonial legacy: An expressivist analysis of transitional justice in consolidated democracies
In the summer of 2020, the Belgian Parliament established a Special Parliamentary Commission tasked with launching an enquiry into Belgium’s overseas colonial legacy and reflecting on appropriate reparations. It was the first consolidated democracy to establish a truth commission to investigate the historical and ongoing injustices related to overseas colonialism. In this article, I argue in favor of treating this commission as a truth commission…
Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth
Truth is a central concept in the struggle for justice for Syrians. Many justice actors have turned to the tools and rhetoric of transitional justice to further the quest for justice and truth. Yet, while doing so has allowed them to generate some international attention for victims, the transitional justice paradigm has several pitfalls. For one, the dominant understanding of truth and truth-seeking embraced in formal mechanisms tends to be narr…
Using restorative justice to rethink the temporality of transition in Chile
Using restorative justice to rethink the temporality of transition in Chile Assumptions of linear progress and a clean break with the past have long characterised transitional justice interventions. This notion of temporality has increasingly been problematised in transitional justice scholarship and practice. Scholars have argued that a more complex understanding of temporalities is needed that better accommodates the temporal messiness and comp…
The Meaning of Participation in Transitional Justice: A Conceptual Proposal for Empirical Analysis
Much has been written about the potential of participatory approaches to entrench and expand transitional justice processes. Yet, evidence-based research on how to understand, organize and evaluate victim participation has lagged behind. Empirical research, moreover, often lacks an explicit conceptualization of participation or adopts existing models that start from an institutional perspective and that normatively hierarchize forms and functions…
Interest organizations across economic sectors: Explaining interest group density in the European Union
The number of interest organizations (density) varies across policy domains, political issues and economic sectors. This shapes the nature and outcomes of interest representation. In this contribution, we explain the density of interest organizations per economic sector in the European Union on the basis of political and economic institutional factors. Focusing on business interest representation, we show that economic institutions structure the …
Stirring the Justice Imagination: Countering the Invisibilization and Erasure of Syrian Victims’ Justice Narratives
With most avenues to pursue justice for Syrian victims of international crimes blocked, Syrian and international justice actors within civil society and formal institutions are active in exploring ways to seek some form of justice and accountability. In doing so, many of them use the language of transitional justice as the most promising paradigm to keep justice on the international agenda and to resist the prevailing defeatism about the possibil…
The Meaning of Participation in Transitional Justice: A Conceptual Proposal for Empirical Analysis
Much has been written about the potential of participatory approaches to entrench and expand transitional justice processes. Yet, evidence-based research on how to understand, organize and evaluate victim participation has lagged behind. Empirical research, moreover, often lacks an explicit conceptualization of participation or adopts existing models that start from an institutional perspective and that normatively hierarchize forms and functions…
Belgium’s “Truth Commission” on its overseas colonial legacy: An expressivist analysis of transitional justice in consolidated democracies
In the summer of 2020, the Belgian Parliament established a Special Parliamentary Commission tasked with launching an enquiry into Belgium’s overseas colonial legacy and reflecting on appropriate reparations. It was the first consolidated democracy to establish a truth commission to investigate the historical and ongoing injustices related to overseas colonialism. In this article, I argue in favor of treating this commission as a truth commission…
Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth
Truth is a central concept in the struggle for justice for Syrians. Many justice actors have turned to the tools and rhetoric of transitional justice to further the quest for justice and truth. Yet, while doing so has allowed them to generate some international attention for victims, the transitional justice paradigm has several pitfalls. For one, the dominant understanding of truth and truth-seeking embraced in formal mechanisms tends to be narr…
Reconciling Discourses on Women's Rights: Learning from Guatemalan Indigenous Women's Groups
A quick review of feminist scholarship in the field of legal studies shows that a tension between equality and complementarity underlies many debates on the issue of women's rights. In this article we use the work of a Guatemalan indigenous women's organization, Kaqla, to revisit this alleged dichotomy. By adopting an actorcentred perspective, we propose a more integrated understanding of several key debates in the field of human rights. In addit…
Understanding the Unforeseen Consequences of an Incomplete Transitional Justice Ecology in the Philippines
The Philippines is not typically the focus of transitional justice (TJ) scholarship. Yet, it has had to deal with violent legacies pertaining to each generation of TJ and has installed several TJ initiatives in response to this. This has given rise to a densely populated TJ landscape, spanning different periods and regions and including both formal and informal initiatives within various TJ pillars. In spite of this plethora of initiatives, the P…
Exploring the Nexus between Transitional Justice and Ecoterritorial Conflict Resolution: Time for an Ecoterritorial Turn in Transformative Transitional Justice
∞ This article explores the nexus between ecoterritorial conflict resolution and transformative transitional justice, against the background of (neo)extractivism and the Peruvian case of half a century of oil violence. Our argument is twofold. On the one hand, we argue that transitional justice can act as a conceptual and analytical lens to better understand and further (claims for) change while also countering the invisibilization of ecoterritor…
Stitching a rights narrative: How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice
Human rights can be seen as a means to improve people's lived realities. Yet the language and practice of human rights are not always moored in these realities. What happens to the meaning of human rights when these are expressed in (partly non-verbal) ways that are deeply rooted in lived-embodied, material, and cultural-realities, and how does that practice transform ideas about rights? In this article, we describe how women from Syrian refugee …
Uprooting the curious grapevine? The transformative potential of reverse standard-setting in the field of human rights
In recent years, the top-down nature of human rights norm-setting has been problematized by scholars and practitioners who — inspired by actor-oriented perspectives on human rights — started to explore the potential role of rights users in the further development of human rights norms at the global level. Based on fieldwork with community-based organizations in Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I argue that the empowering potent…
Learning from the past? How the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, civil society initiatives and survivor stories shape young Cambodians’ understanding of non-recurrence
Empirical research into the communicative and didactic functions of transitional justice processes remains scarce, obscuring our understanding of their meaningfulness as message sending mechanisms and their (potential) influence on popular knowledge and beliefs. Engaging with expressivist theory, this article focusses on the Cambodian context to study how young adults perceive and interact with messages on memory, justice and 'dealing with the pa…
Disruptive accountability? Temporal regimes and social change in decolonization struggles in Belgium
To address the legacies of colonialism, several former colonial states have implemented a range of initiatives commonly considered to belong to the domain of transitional justice (TJ). These contexts are, however, very different from those for which TJ was initially conceptualized. As such, the implementation of elements from the TJ toolbox in these decolonization struggles raises several questions, which this article seeks to address. One of the…
Reconciling Discourses on Women's Rights: Learning from Guatemalan Indigenous Women's Groups
A quick review of feminist scholarship in the field of legal studies shows that a tension between equality and complementarity underlies many debates on the issue of women's rights. In this article we use the work of a Guatemalan indigenous women's organization, Kaqla, to revisit this alleged dichotomy. By adopting an actorcentred perspective, we propose a more integrated understanding of several key debates in the field of human rights. In addit…
Karen Kampwirth, Latin America’s New Left and the Politics of Gender: Lessons from Nicaragua
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Interest organizations across economic sectors: Explaining interest group density in the European Union
The number of interest organizations (density) varies across policy domains, political issues and economic sectors. This shapes the nature and outcomes of interest representation. In this contribution, we explain the density of interest organizations per economic sector in the European Union on the basis of political and economic institutional factors. Focusing on business interest representation, we show that economic institutions structure the …
Uprooting the curious grapevine? The transformative potential of reverse standard-setting in the field of human rights
In recent years, the top-down nature of human rights norm-setting has been problematized by scholars and practitioners who — inspired by actor-oriented perspectives on human rights — started to explore the potential role of rights users in the further development of human rights norms at the global level. Based on fieldwork with community-based organizations in Guatemala and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I argue that the empowering potent…
Responsive planning in development interventions: Consulting rights-holders in the Sanitized Villages programme in Kongo Central
This article empirically examines one of the most important causes of the non-implementation of human rights-based approaches to development (HRBAD): their alleged limited relevance for actors on the ground. The article argues that claims about local relevance can only be made after meaningful consultation with local rights-holders. Consulting local rights-holders in order to ensure responsive planning is not only relevant for HRBADs, but for dev…
A praxis-based understanding of new duty bearers examining contextual realities in the DRC
The debate about legal accountability for human rights is routinely conducted from a legalistic or institutional point of view, which often leads to the conclusion that there is no legal ground for expanding the notion of duty bearers. In this article, we ask whether disenfranchised rights holders themselves are supportive of a broader understanding of duty bearers. We assess the nature of the local discourse on duty bearers in several villages i…
Gender-Aware and Place-Based Transitional Justice in Guatemala: Altering the Opportunity Structures for Post-Conflict Women’s Mobilization
Place-based approaches to transitional justice, which foreground victim participation, have become increasingly popular in the last decade. The assumption is that these approaches enhance legitimacy, increase the local relevance of interventions, and empower victims. However, the causal mechanisms by which this alleged empowerment takes place, are not usually studied in great detail. This article examines whether altering the opportunity structur…
Neglecting Social and Economic Rights Violations in Transitional Justice: Long-Term Effects on Accountability: Empirical Findings from the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
This article builds on theories about the expressive function of law and uses Structural Topic Modelling to examine how the prioritisation of civil and political rights (CPR) issues by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has affected the agendas of Cambodian human rights NGOs with an international profile. It asks whether these NGOs’ focus on CPR issues can be traced back to the near-exclusive focus on CPR issues by the co…
Human Rights Transformation in Practice
Human rights are increasingly described as being in crisis, but the ideals inherent in them remain appealing. Human Rights Transformation in Practice demonstrates how these ideals are embedded in everyday social practice and activism, and how they can be reinterpreted and redefined in a variety of contexts and for a range of problems
Performative justice? The role of theatre and performance in facilitating transitional justice
Interactions between theatre and performance studies and trauma and memory studies have grown in depth and ampleur in the last two decades. Theatre and performance can offer new perspectives on, and potential coping mechanisms for, dealing with trauma that are also salient to other fields of study, such as transitional justice. Literature on transitional justice deals with the question of how societies can deal with violence and trauma inflicted …
Using restorative justice to rethink the temporality of transition in Chile
Using restorative justice to rethink the temporality of transition in Chile Assumptions of linear progress and a clean break with the past have long characterised transitional justice interventions. This notion of temporality has increasingly been problematised in transitional justice scholarship and practice. Scholars have argued that a more complex understanding of temporalities is needed that better accommodates the temporal messiness and comp…
The Meaning of Participation in Transitional Justice: A Conceptual Proposal for Empirical Analysis
Much has been written about the potential of participatory approaches to entrench and expand transitional justice processes. Yet, evidence-based research on how to understand, organize and evaluate victim participation has lagged behind. Empirical research, moreover, often lacks an explicit conceptualization of participation or adopts existing models that start from an institutional perspective and that normatively hierarchize forms and functions…
Stirring the Justice Imagination: Countering the Invisibilization and Erasure of Syrian Victims’ Justice Narratives
With most avenues to pursue justice for Syrian victims of international crimes blocked, Syrian and international justice actors within civil society and formal institutions are active in exploring ways to seek some form of justice and accountability. In doing so, many of them use the language of transitional justice as the most promising paradigm to keep justice on the international agenda and to resist the prevailing defeatism about the possibil…
Belgium’s “Truth Commission” on its overseas colonial legacy: An expressivist analysis of transitional justice in consolidated democracies
In the summer of 2020, the Belgian Parliament established a Special Parliamentary Commission tasked with launching an enquiry into Belgium’s overseas colonial legacy and reflecting on appropriate reparations. It was the first consolidated democracy to establish a truth commission to investigate the historical and ongoing injustices related to overseas colonialism. In this article, I argue in favor of treating this commission as a truth commission…
Moving Beyond Formal Truth Practices and Forensic Truth in the Syrian Conflict: How Informal Truth Practices Contribute to Thicker Understandings of Truth
Truth is a central concept in the struggle for justice for Syrians. Many justice actors have turned to the tools and rhetoric of transitional justice to further the quest for justice and truth. Yet, while doing so has allowed them to generate some international attention for victims, the transitional justice paradigm has several pitfalls. For one, the dominant understanding of truth and truth-seeking embraced in formal mechanisms tends to be narr…
Disruptive Reparations? Tunisia's Victim Regions and the Collective Reparations Dilemma in Transitional Societies
In the past decade, an encompassing transitional justice process has been developed in Tunisia, which interacts with various other policy domains, including that of development. This article foregrounds three important interrelated innovations of Tunisia's transitional justice process: The explicit attention to economic crimes and violations of economic, social, and cultural rights; the introduction of the notion of victim regions; and the concep…
The Truthfulness Lies in the Process, Not the Outcome” Using Artistic Practices to Further Truth-Telling and Memorialization in the Philippines
The Philippines have never known a unified state-sanctioned narrative about the violence that happened during the Marcos dictatorship. In order to resist ongoing disinformation campaigns that seek to erase evidence and memories of past violence, various institutional and civil society actors are currently initiating interventions in the domain of truth and memorialization. Notably, artists, curators, and creative professionals are engaging in var…
Understanding the Unforeseen Consequences of an Incomplete Transitional Justice Ecology in the Philippines
The Philippines is not typically the focus of transitional justice (TJ) scholarship. Yet, it has had to deal with violent legacies pertaining to each generation of TJ and has installed several TJ initiatives in response to this. This has given rise to a densely populated TJ landscape, spanning different periods and regions and including both formal and informal initiatives within various TJ pillars. In spite of this plethora of initiatives, the P…
Exploring the Nexus between Transitional Justice and Ecoterritorial Conflict Resolution: Time for an Ecoterritorial Turn in Transformative Transitional Justice
∞ This article explores the nexus between ecoterritorial conflict resolution and transformative transitional justice, against the background of (neo)extractivism and the Peruvian case of half a century of oil violence. Our argument is twofold. On the one hand, we argue that transitional justice can act as a conceptual and analytical lens to better understand and further (claims for) change while also countering the invisibilization of ecoterritor…
Remembering Martial Law: An Eco-System of Truth Initiatives and the Emergence of Narrative Documentation in the Philippines
In the Philippines, governmental and civil society actors installed a range of mechanisms to deal with violent legacies of the Marcos regime. Formal truth-telling mechanisms were, however, not part of the early transitional justice architecture, meaning that truth-seeking initially took place as part of other justice efforts. Nonetheless, more recently, a boom in truth, documentation and memorialization processes has resulted in a dynamic eco-sys…
Literary accountability and the future of human rights protection
Human rights are increasingly described as in crisis. One reason for this is that existing legal accountability mechanisms cannot adequately deal with intricate and multilayered human rights violations that occur in vastly complex social contexts. Thus, if human rights are to continue to offer a widely accepted framework for thinking about (social) justice, we urgently need to revisit the very notion of human rights accountability in ways that al…
Disruptive accountability? Temporal regimes and social change in decolonization struggles in Belgium
To address the legacies of colonialism, several former colonial states have implemented a range of initiatives commonly considered to belong to the domain of transitional justice (TJ). These contexts are, however, very different from those for which TJ was initially conceptualized. As such, the implementation of elements from the TJ toolbox in these decolonization struggles raises several questions, which this article seeks to address. One of the…
Stitching a rights narrative: How Syrian women in Shatila use embroidery to express ideas about social justice
Human rights can be seen as a means to improve people's lived realities. Yet the language and practice of human rights are not always moored in these realities. What happens to the meaning of human rights when these are expressed in (partly non-verbal) ways that are deeply rooted in lived-embodied, material, and cultural-realities, and how does that practice transform ideas about rights? In this article, we describe how women from Syrian refugee …
Contextualising the absence of standardised approaches to transitional justice in the Philippines
The professionalisation, institutionalisation and standardisation of transitional justice has often been critiqued for pushing more informal, vernacular or experimental approaches off the radar. While this concern is legitimate and needs to be addressed, this article explores the continued relevance of standardised approaches, and of a shared language of transitional justice more specifically. I develop this argument against the background of rec…
Learning from the past? How the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, civil society initiatives and survivor stories shape young Cambodians’ understanding of non-recurrence
Empirical research into the communicative and didactic functions of transitional justice processes remains scarce, obscuring our understanding of their meaningfulness as message sending mechanisms and their (potential) influence on popular knowledge and beliefs. Engaging with expressivist theory, this article focusses on the Cambodian context to study how young adults perceive and interact with messages on memory, justice and 'dealing with the pa…
Political science (28 works) · Law (24 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (22 works) · Economic Justice (17 works) · Transitional justice (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · Human rights (10 works) · Cambodian History and Society (9 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (9 works)