On 15 July each year, Women in Black, an antimilitarist and feminist organization based in Belgrade, organize or participate in events in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to mark the anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica. In 2010, in collaboration with a number of artists, Women in Black blocked the main pedestrian mall in Belgrade and, under police protection, laid out about 500 pairs of shoes given to them by Serbian citizens. Each pair represented the life and death of a person killed in the massacre, and each carried a handwritten message from the person who gave it. We analyse the meaning and significance of this campaign as a civil society mechanism of accountability and moral reparations. Although criminal prosecutions for war crimes in the Balkans have been taking place for nearly two decades, they have not been able to address the conflicts and animosities that persist in the region. We argue that by participating in ‘One Pair of Shoes, One Life,’ Serbian citizens have begun to take steps towards publicly accepting responsibility for failing to prevent the crime of genocide perpetrated in their name.

The impact of civil society on transitional justice is complex in part because civil society is composed of a multitude of actors, faith-based and secular, whose preferences for accountability and truth reflect their varying interests and beliefs about justice. Transnational faith-based and secular actors have played a central role in mobilizing support for liberal-legal strategies designed to hold perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable. Local faith-based actors have been resilient to pressure for conformity and have instead played a pivotal role in adapting international accountability norms and embedding them in local practices. Other locally rooted actors in civil society have rejected or adapted international strategies despite sharing an understanding of justice with international civil society actors. This article develops a framework for understanding the roles different civil society actors play in navigating and negotiating the boundary between international expectations for accountability and local practice. Its premise is that normative contestation over appropriate strategies for dealing with the past is robust, and that much of this contestation takes place through the work of civil society actors who translate global norms into local practice rather than through vigorous public debate.

The military regime that controlled Argentina between 1976 and 1983 sought to radically depoliticize Argentine society through a violent campaign of social exclusion. Although this campaign required the active participation of the country’s major civil institutions, scholars of Argentina’s dictatorship and subsequent democratic transition have largely neglected the behavior of these key groups. This article examines the conduct of one such institution, the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations (DAIA), the Jewish community’s official political representative. DAIA’s drive for normality in the face of disorienting violence led the group, like many civil institutions, to cooperate with an abhorrent regime. DAIA’s cooperation entailed no obvious crimes, but it did contribute markedly to the climate of fear and isolation central to the military’s repressive social project. Rather than continue to ignore the critical role played by groups like DAIA, transitional justice mechanisms must be developed to account for this ‘political’ sort of complicity.

The article focuses on the interplay between donors and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) with regards to monitoring of the gacaca courts in Rwanda. While both donors and INGOs agreed that monitoring had a positive outcome on information gathering and sharing, as well as on limiting human rights violations by the courts themselves, they disagreed on the extent to which donors should have supported INGOs’ recommendations for improvements to the process. As a result of their service delivery role, INGOs expected to be granted more space by the Rwandan authorities to help improve the gacaca process. When they realized this space would not be available, they relied on donors to support their efforts by pressuring the Rwandan government. Donors did not share the INGOs’ aims, however, and had a number of reasons for not intervening more strongly, thereby frustrating the INGOs’ efforts. The lessons learned from this dynamic may be useful in the design of future localized transitional justice processes, particularly as they highlight a need for better articulation of goals and expectations, as well as the necessity of coordinated strategies on monitoring and follow-through on the resulting recommendations to effecting the desired impacts.

Through an exchange between members of community-based organizations that document human rights violations in northwest Colombia and northern Uganda, this article examines multiple strategies of memory making in which an individual or a collective creates a safe social space to give testimony and re-story past events of violence or resistance. In settings of chronic insecurity, such acts constitute a reservoir of living documents to preserve memories, give testimony, contest impunity and convey the meaning, or the ‘truthfulness,’ of survivors. The living archive disrupts conventional assumptions about what is documentation or witnessing in the field of transitional justice and introduces new interdisciplinary tools to the field with which to learn from and listen differently to survivors.

Transitional justice discourse is underpinned by an assumption that trials and truth commissions will assist individuals and societies to ‘come to terms’ with, and move on from, complex legacies of violence. This article considers how local practices of memorialization and commemoration, and the activities of victims’ groups in East Timor, disrupt these assumptions. It highlights how individuals and local communities in East Timor are attempting to ‘remake a world’ in ways that may differ markedly from the priorities of UN-sponsored transitional justice institutions and their nation’s leaders. In addition, it explores how some survivors are embracing the language of victims’ rights to appeal to the state to respond to their experiences of suffering. These developments, which indicate that survivors are in various ways embracing, resisting and transforming ‘official’ justice discourses, highlight that the pursuit of justice in post-referendum East Timor is far more dynamic, locally grounded and open-ended than the narrative of transition implies.

Truth telling in response to massive violations of human rights is a gendered sociopolitical and cultural construction. It is also inherently relational and necessitates multidimensional engagement between state and civil society. Drawing on two years of feminist participatory action research, this article explores the significance of civil society-initiated truth-telling processes in Guatemala, in particular the 2010 Tribunal of Conscience for Women Survivors of Sexual Violence during the Armed Conflict. It seeks to clarify how local, national and transnational webs of relationships, and the speech acts and silences they simultaneously engender, inform processes of transformation from victim to survivor, or reinforce or reify victimization. The article examines the conditions under which indigenous women whose identities are deeply situated within local Mayan communities can narrate truth outside of those contexts, how the multiple spectators who are on the receiving end of those processes relate to ‘the pain of others’ and implications for future truth-telling processes.

The article argues that narratives of transitional justice have been placed on a somewhat unexamined pedestal in the social sciences and the humanities. Within such narratives, transitional justice, as both a phenomenon and a conceptual tool, is regarded as inevitable and commonplace for anyone wishing to address the issue of past human rights violations. The article suggests that while the concept of transition, strictly speaking, is merely descriptive of processes of change and thereby assumedly a neutral signifier, it has been positively oversignified by various fields of study. The article also examines literary narratives that have political transitions as their foci, proposing that a literary theory approach to transitional narratives should not be dictated only by the privileged themes, forms and narrative structures of the normative narratives of transitional justice (such as truth commission reports), but be open to fictional narratives as having something valuable to contribute within the context of political transitions.

This article argues that international criminal law distinguishes between ‘civil society as subject’ (expert international nongovernmental organizations and transnational networks of activists voluntarily entering into the international criminal justice arena) and ‘civil society as object’ (objects of the purportedly transformative processes of international criminal law). Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) has adopted a different approach towards civil society than that of the ad hoc Tribunals, it too struggles to provide ‘civil society as object’ with a meaningful opportunity to participate, as exemplified by continuing difficulties with the operation of victim participation. And yet, just as ‘civil society as subject’ has benefited from the institutionalization of civil society at the ICC, so has the ICC benefited from the mobilization of the expertise of ‘civil society as subject.’ The danger is that other voices are thereby excluded to the detriment of justice.

The displacement of people from their homes and communities as a result of conflict and human rights abuses is an important factor in the contexts in which transitional justice normally operates. Yet, it is one that has not figured prominently in either the literature or the practice of transitional justice. This article is an attempt to think through how transitional justice fits within the broader response to the problem of displacement. It argues that transitional justice can and should address displacement, but in doing so it must take into account and establish links with other relevant actors. The first section of the article considers some of the reasons why displacement, as a human rights issue, is of concern to transitional justice, as well as some examples of transitional justice measures that have dealt with displacement. The following two sections raise questions about the capacity of transitional justice measures meaningfully to engage displaced persons and their concerns. The next three sections then try to identify some linkages between transitional justice measures and the work of displacement actors, including potential tensions, opportunities for cooperation and coordination and avenues of mutual reinforcement. The article concludes with a broader perspective on how transitional justice may conceptually fit within a comprehensive and coherent approach to displacement.

This article examines efforts to account for missing persons from the apartheid era in South Africa by family members, civil society organizations and the current government’s Missing Persons Task Team, which emerged out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. It focuses on how missing persons have been officially defined in the South African context and the extent to which the South African government is able to address the current needs and desires of relatives of the missing. I make two main arguments: that family members ought to have an active role in shaping the initiatives and institutions that seek to resolve the fate of missing people, and that the South African government ought to take a more holistic ‘grave-to-grave’ approach to the process of identifying, returning and reburying the remains of the missing.

Mass famines routinely accompany the commission of violent international crimes during periods of armed conflict or under repressive regimes. Indeed, suffering wrought by avoidable famine continues to plague civilians in places such as Gaza, Darfur and North Korea. Too often, instances of mass famine are dismissed as the products of mistakes or unfavourable weather, rather than criminal acts. To date, no court has entered a conviction for an international crime predicated explicitly on famine. This article explores how the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) can take an important step towards rectifying this prosecutorial gap by addressing the famine that occurred in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge during the period of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979). The famine wrought unimaginable suffering and resulted in the deaths of up to one million Cambodian civilians. Specifically, this article explores the combination of three enumerated crimes against humanity – extermination, other inhumane acts and persecution – as one possible legal framework to account for famine and starvation at the ECCC. An overview of possible sources of evidence is used to forecast potential outcomes at the ECCC for each crime against humanity discussed.

In this article, we untangle the relationships among law, power and justice as they impact on the lives of ordinary Rwandans brought into contact with the state and local officials through the gacaca process. Drawing on 37 life-history interviews conducted in 2006, we find that gacaca reinforces a particular version of postgenocide justice that renders the average Rwandan citizen largely powerless over individual processes of reconciliation while serving to maintain a climate of fear and insecurity in their everyday lives. Locating the Rwandan case more broadly, we caution that a preoccupation with harmonizing traditional justice with international standards must look beyond forms of legality. While gacaca may be legally acceptable in a harmonized way, it is both a product and a producer of relations of state power that operate to impact negatively on conflict-affected individuals who bear the brunt of government-led initiatives to promote justice and reconciliation.

The conditionality policies of the European Union (EU) have been of crucial importance to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Bereft of police powers, the ICTY must turn to powerful international actors such as the EU to press targeted states to hand over their nationals for trial. The EU, a supporter of the tribunal and human rights, has used the promise of membership as leverage to bolster the tribunal in its quest for cooperation from the Yugoslav successor states. This article uses the case of Serbia to show that the EU has not been a consistent ‘surrogate enforcer’ for the tribunal. The fact that the ICTY can inadvertently empower nationalists and weaken reformers and threaten stability, has created a quandary for the EU. The article examines the EU’s approach to this quandary by explaining how and why the Union has strengthened or diluted its conditionality policy vis-à-vis Serbia at key junctures.

Despite many transitional justice processes claiming to be ‘victim-centred,’ in practice they are rarely driven by the needs of those most affected by conflict. Indeed, in many contexts the views of victims are not sought by those driving the transition. In this article, the needs of a representative sample of 160 families of people disappeared during Nepal’s decade-long Maoist insurgency are studied in an effort to understand what such families seek from the transitional justice process. The study shows that victims emphasize the need for the truth about the disappeared and for economic support to help meet basic needs. Whilst families of the disappeared would welcome justice, this is not their priority. Nepal’s transitional justice process remains still-born and discussions are polarized between a human rights community that prioritizes prosecutions and a political class that seeks to avoid them. An understanding of victims’ expectations of the process can potentially break this deadlock and allow policies to be driven by the needs of those most affected.