Wladimir Santana Fernandes defends his PhD thesis
Wladimir Santana Fernandes defends his PhD thesis 'Pragmatic Justice and Revolutionary Aspirations: TJ Standardization and the Politics of Justice for Syria between 2011 and 2024'
The defense is public, and everybody is welcome; the defense is scheduled for a maximum of three hours and will be held in English.
Follow the defense online via Zoom
The Doctoral School at Department of People and Technology will host a small reception afterwards.
Supervisors and assessment
Assessment committee:
- Kerstin Carlson, Associate Professor, ISE, Roskilde University, Denmark (chairperson)
- Stephen Winter, Associate Professor, University of Auckland, New Zealand
- Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Professor, La Trobe University, Australia
Leader of the defence:
- Lena Brogaard, Associate Professor, ISE, Roskilde University
Co-Supervisor:
- Sune Haugbølle, Professor, ISE, Roskilde University
PhD Main-Supervisor:
- Line Engbo Gissel, Associate Professor, ISE, Roskilde University
Resumé
This dissertation offers a qualitative study of justice efforts for Syria between 2011-2024 in light of a contemporary development in the field of transitional justice (TJ), its standardization. It examines the processes of justice that became possible in the period, the actors that shaped the application of standards, and the challenges of implementing them. Crucially, the dissertation interrogates how transitional justice standards accommodate a context that is neither transitional, nor welcoming to its application. This kind of context is currently becoming the most prevalent for TJ practice, and as such, Syria offers a useful learning opportunity for the field.
The dissertation is based on qualitative research methods. It uses interpretative content analysis and process tracing, and relies on different sources of data, such as interviews, documents, and observations. The research focuses on the work of Syrian and international activists, practitioners, and bureaucrats positioned in NGOs and IOs that were at the forefront of justice efforts for Syria. The field was therefore transnational and involved online and in-person engagement with actors across multiple countries.
This dissertation understands TJ standards as both an informal script composed of discourses about what justice for mass atrocities should look like, and as concrete policies. The study analyzes how Syrian and international actors articulated these discourses and policies to serve justice for Syria. Until the fall of the Assad regime in 2024, justice for mass atrocities inside Syria was largely absent, due to the authoritarian nature of the regime, and a then unsettled civil war that involved several conflict parties implicated in human rights violations. Nevertheless, Syrian civil society has amassed a large archive of atrocities that has been used in legal and recognition processes. The international community has created new international institutions, while foreign courts carried out trials on the basis of universal jurisdiction to consider human rights violations committed in Syria. The encounters between these actors enabled some forms of justice for Syria outside the country, but not others.
The dissertation argues that TJ for Syria was both a revolutionary and a transnational project that exposes practical and conceptual limits of TJ standards to accommodate contexts of ongoing conflict and state hostility. While the TJ standard is based on assumptions about the neutrality and universality of its conceptual package, its appropriation by Syrian civil society charted different and competing revolutionary aspirations, that were neither based on universal meanings, nor above politics. In terms of justice policies and institutions, creating implementable processes for Syria required negotiation, design choices, and strategies to circumvent the Syrian state. This included limiting justice processes’ functional possibilities, as well as postponing and tempering some of the TJ script’s loftier aspirations. The ensuing international justice processes were often welcomed by affected communities as a first step towards TJ, but did not escape ambivalences and debates over ownership, legitimacy, and meaning.
The dissertation makes empirical and theoretical contributions distributed across three articles. Empirically, it offers an analysis of the consolidation of TJ discourse among justice actors between 2011-2024, how it influenced policymaking, and how Syrian activists perceived the resulting justice practices. It offers a detailed investigation of the politics and process of designing a new international institution to search for the missing in Syria (in Article I), a study of justice imaginaries within Syrian civil society (in Article II), and an analysis of the challenges of operationalizing a liberal form of justice in adverse conditions (in Article III). Theoretically, it conceptualizes the ideal notion of the state that structures the practice and concept of TJ, the circumvention and surrogacy that forms strategies of policy implementation, and the notion of pragmatic TJ that allows a standardized field to accommodate pragmatic policy decisions.
The dissertation will be available for reading at the Roskilde University Library before the defence (on-site use). The dissertation will also be available at the defence.