Suchergebnisse

This article will examine the reasons behind Israel's and the international community's refusal to engage Hamas in the internationally sanctioned 'peace process'. It will be argued here that more important than the 'strategic' challenges Hamas is deemed to pose to this process, are the epistemological and ontological challenges the movement intrinsically poses to the dominant normative framework that underpins the process. In order to understand the roots of this challenge, I will employ the three-pronged approach of what Florian Hoffman refers to as 'epistemological relativism'. This entails a 'complexification' of the normative framework on which the discourse of the peace process is based; a 'de-exoticisation' of the normative framework in which the Other — in this case Hamas — operates; and a 're-exoticisation' of the normative framework on which the process is predicated, 'showing its contingent and idiosyncratic nature', and therefore creating a space in which the Other may be understood and engaged. The article will conclude by arguing that it is only once this process has been undertaken that we can begin to fathom the establishment of an enduring peace between Israel and Palestine, which is considered 'just' by all parties to the 'conflict'.

Th is article discusses the politics of "transition" in Tunisia and locates Tunisia's post-uprising justice initiatives within existing critical literature on global liberal governance and transitional justice. Methodologically, it treats transitional justice as a site of contestation, involving the exercise of domestic and transnational strategies of power as well as the oft en subversive agency of former and ongoing victims of state crime. By examining noninstitutionalized forms of contestation, this article seeks to understand and contextualize the fears expressed by some victims that the formal transitional justice process may be a diversion from, rather than bridge to, revolutionary aims.

Building on decades of struggle, the January 2011 Tunisian uprising triggered a wave of popular revolt that spread across North Africa and West Asia. After the uprising, Tunisia became the focus of a celebrated project of transitional justice, which is now the globally mandated method of reconciling victims and perpetrators following a nonrevolutionary regime change. However, Tunisia's process of transitional justice must be critically examined. The very paradigm employed—that is, the rule of law that transitional justice consistently seeks to impose—is skewed in favor of imperial interests, which can be traced to the paradigm's origins in the mid–twentieth century victory of European powers over Nazi Germany and its allies. There are other models of justice, however, that are not rooted in this Eurocentric victor's history, but instead derive from revolutionary traditions. A key one is the People's Tribunal, used since the late 1960s. The convening of a People's Tribunal in Tunisia could help amplify and extend the popular-justice claims that surfaced during the country's recent transitional-justice process. Establishing such a tribunal might help build a symbolic reservoir and organizational force that could ultimately contribute to substantial revolutionary change in the country.