Call for Abstracts: International workshop on Toolkits and Standards in Transitional Justice

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

Toolkits and Standards in Transitional Justice: Consolidation, Innovation and Implications  

Please send abstracts of max. 350 words to lijeja@ruc.dk by November 25th, 2022. We expect to communicate decisions on paper acceptance by December 15th, 2022. After the conference, we will explore participants’ interest in contributing to a journal special issue.

During the past two decades, actors have developed a large number of transitional justice (TJ) toolkits, guidelines and policy papers, which offer similar conceptualisations and generic approaches to dealing with a traumatic past. They stress the need for contextualisation, while also defining TJ in terms of four ‘essential’ and ‘complementary’ pillars: criminal justice, truth-seeking, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence. This convergence of ideas suggests that TJ has been standardised.

This workshop seeks to analyse and reflect on the role of TJ toolkits, blueprints, and guidelines in shaping local TJ policies and institutions. It asks how and why policy makers and advocacy actors around the world come to design, adopt, or adapt similar TJ interventions or, alternatively, how and why they resist the blueprint. Is such agency consolidating or innovating TJ and what does it imply for justice? Papers could analyse the ongoing TJ process in Colombia or other TJ sites of empirical or theoretical interest, such as country cases, civil society organisations, and standard-setting global or regional organisations, or contribute conceptual work on the professionalization and standardisation of the field.

We invite papers that explore questions such as:
• Is there an international blueprint or toolkit for TJ and, if so, what work does it do?
• To what extent do particular TJ processes adopt, adapt or resist the global TJ toolkit?
• To what extent do TJ processes reflect differential capabilities of international and local actors?
• What is the role of power in TJ design?
• How are generic TJ mechanisms interpreted and localised in texts and practices?
• Who has participated in formulating and institutionalizing the global TJ toolkit or blueprint?
• Which local innovations have been accepted as the TJ standard?
• How do responses to standardisation consolidate and/or innovate the field?
• What are the implications of using an international blueprint?

The workshop welcomes online and in-person paper presentations and discussions as well as interdisciplinary work and papers from all social science disciplines and law. There will be translation between English and Spanish, and we welcome abstracts in both languages.

Duration: This will be a two-day workshop, including 1,5 days of academic programme followed by a visit to a TJ-related site in or near Bogota.

Organizers: Line E. Gissel (Roskilde University), Line J. Jakobsen (Roskilde University), Angelika Rettberg (Universidad de los Andes) and Thomas Obel Hansen (Ulster University).