This plural view of justice responds to the critique that TJ fails to incorporate an explicit, comprehensive and thoughtful approach to addressing socioeconomic issues in its work. To meaningfully address conflict drivers, transitional justice must take place along a "Justice Continuum of Repair", which includes more than just reparative and retributive justice. The justice continuum includes restorative justice to mend local relations, equip communities with conflict resolution skills, and foster local reconciliation civic justice to vindicate civil rights and cultivate active citizen participation in local democracies and even socioeconomic and redistributive justice to address historical marginalization and structural inequalities suffered by the population before, during and after the conflict (subject to the TJ process). To better accommodate the broader range of expectations and needs of victims, it includes more than just reparative and retributive justice. In response to this situation, I developed what I call a “ justice continuum of repair” which outlines a plural approach to justice in transitional justice settings. Their dissatisfaction and potential rejection of the government’s programming threatened to undermine the efforts of the TJ process, and even to reverse any positive impacts of the country’s truth commission and criminal trials. In Peru, to "feel repaired", victims of conflict often expected development and social inclusion more than traditional legal redress.Ĭommunities eligible for collective reparations would complain that the government was dressing up its poverty reduction measures as reparations – noting that the two measures arose out of separate legal obligations under human rights law. For example, an indigenous campesina, whose son had been disappeared, wanted farm animals to assure her family’s survival. Instead, they often sought measures that more closely resembled development-like projects. I would ask victims of Peru’s war about what was needed to “feel repaired.” What they told me rarely resembled the type of traditional legal damages that directly respond to harm from civil and political rights violations. In my own fieldwork I bore witness to how Peru’s TJ’s process failed to address the underlying socioeconomic conditions of its internal armed conflict (1980-2000). As noted by the German government, these are the very conditions which create the “fertile ground” for violent extremism and the exploitation of ethnical, national and religious divisions. A narrow view of the problem leaves the vulnerable populations most impacted by violent conflict marginalized and disenfranchised as they continue to struggle to simply survive. Yet, these measures fall short of true transformation: they do not adequately address poverty, social inequality and other socioeconomic issues that typically trouble those countries that adopt a TJ process. The field of Transitional Justice (TJ) rests on an assumption that apolitical, technocratic mechanisms like truth commissions, trials, and reparations will assure stable and sustainable peace in countries recovering from violent conflict.
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