Search results

"Transitional justice is the dominant lens through which the world grapples with legacies of mass atrocity, and yet it has rarely reflected the diversity of peace and justice traditions around the world. Hewing to a largely Western and legalist script, truth commissions and war crimes tribunals have become the default means of "doing justice." Rethinking Transitional Justice for the Twenty-First Century puts the blind spots and assumptions of transitional justice under the microscope and asks whether the field might be re-imagined to better suit the diversity and realities of the twenty-first century. At the core of this reimagining is an examination of the broader field of post conflict peace building and associated critical theory, from which both caution and inspiration can be drawn. By using this lens, Dustin N. Sharp shows how we might begin to generate a more cosmopolitan and mosaic theory and imagine more creative and context-sensitive approaches to building peace with justice"--

Transitional justice is the dominant lens through which the world grapples with legacies of mass atrocity, and yet it has rarely reflected the diversity of peace and justice traditions around the world. Hewing to a largely western and legalist script, truth commissions and war crimes tribunals have become the default means of 'doing justice'. Re-Thinking Transitional Justice for the Twenty-First Century puts the blind spots and assumptions of transitional justice under the microscope, and asks whether the field might be re-imagined to better suit the diversity and realities of the twenty-first century. At the core of this re-imagining is an examination of the broader field of post-conflict peace building and associated critical theory, from which both caution and inspiration can be drawn. By using this lens, Dustin N. Sharp shows how we might begin to generate a more cosmopolitan and mosaic theory and imagine more creative and context-sensitive approaches to building peace with justice

This book examines the role of economic violence (violations of economic and social rights, corruption, and plunder of natural resources) within the transitional justice agenda. Because economic violence often leads to conflict, is perpetrated during conflict, and continues afterwards as a legacy of conflict, a greater focus on economic and social rights issues in the transitional justice context is critical. One might add that insofar as transitional justice is increasingly seen as an instrument of peacebuilding rather than a simple political transition, focus on economic violence as the crucial 'root cause' is key to preventing re-lapse into conflict. Recent increasing attention to economic issues by academics and truth commissions suggest this may be slowly changing, and that economic and social rights may represent the 'next frontier' of transitional justice concerns. There remain difficult questions that have yet to be worked out at the level of theory, policy, and practice. Further scholarship in this regard is both timely, and necessary. This volume therefore presents an opportunity to fill an important gap. The project will bring together new papers by recognized and emerging scholars and policy experts in the field.--Provided by publisher

This essay revisits Johan Galtung's early articulation of the concept of "positive peace" in order to re-surface its fundamental radicalism, together with some of its inherent tensions, paradoxes, and politics. It then explores the linkages and contested relationship between the concept of positive peace and the prevailing peacebuilding paradigm of our day: liberal peacebuilding. I argue that our understanding of debates about both positive peace and liberal peacebuilding can be clarified when viewed through the lens of contested liberalisms and conflicting liberal values. Such debates often appear to reflect more of a political and ideological debate within the larger liberal tradition itself and between competing liberal values than some kind of choice between liberal, illiberal, or "postliberal" peacebuilding. Advancing peace theory and praxis at this stage would benefit from an increasing willingness to more openly confront some of these choices and a greater degree of transparency about our liberal commitments, including in the hard, "real world" cases where tensions seem irreconcilable.