Forskningsprojekt > The Standardisation of Transitional Justice: Consolidation, Innovation and Politics > Nyhed

Project Member Wladimir Fernandes is Awarded PhD Degree

On 9 April, Wladimir Santana Fernandes defended his PhD dissertation, "Pragmatic Justice and Revolutionary Aspirations: TJ Standardization and the Politics of Justice for Syria between 2011 and 2024". The assessment committee comprised Stephen Winter, University of Auckland, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, La Trobe University, and Kerstin Bree Carlson, Roskilde University.
Udgivet af:
  • The Standardisation of Transitional Justice: Consolidation, Innovation and Politics (Forskningsprojekt)
    • Photo of Sune Haugbølle, Wladimir Fernandes and Line Engbo Gissel
    Af: Line Engbo Gissel

    The dissertation argues that the transnational encounters which articulates justice for Syria expose the conceptual and practical limits of the TJ standard in accommodating contexts of ongoing conflict and state hostility. On the one hand, the collaborations between Syrian civil society, IOs, and INGOs made some form of justice for Syria possible. The assembly of atrocity archives, the creation of the IIIM, and the mobilization of state and non-state litigation bodies, routinized criminal accountability through universal jurisdiction. Documentation, fact-finding missions, the COI, and the IIMP lived up to the script’s discourse about the importance of truth and remembrance. Advocating, imagining, and planning TJ have kept alive hope and know-how for some of the script’s unrealized requirements, such as reparations and reforms. 

    On the other hand, these processes were often limited in reach and ambition. Justice and human rights work inside Syria was dangerous and international justice institutions lacked access to the Syrian territory, which limited their functional possibilities. And while Syrian activists associated TJ with revolutionary ambitions, the absence of a political transition led to a deferral of some of the script’s more ambitious goals, such as democratization, peace, and reconciliation.

    Some of these challenges are contextually indexed. The hostility from the Syrian state forced justice actors into exile, foreclosed domestic routes to justice, and limited the reach of international institutions. The emergence of a civil war with international dimensions reduced the prospects of a political transition that could support a comprehensive justice process. Internationally, there was support for some forms of justice, but not others, a partiality that often intersected with geopolitical dynamics, such as influence competitions in the Middle East, and the war on terror.

    At the same time, where TJ practice was possible, it was also marred by negotiations, choices, contestations, and struggles over legitimacy and meaning. At the level of TJ planning and imagination, Syrian civil society converged on the need for a new Syria but foresaw different ways that TJ could lend itself for this project. The TJ standard could accommodate some of the divergences between these views, based on the resonance between some of its policy packages. Other divergences, however, relate to ideas about structural transformations that challenge the standard’s approach to criminal accountability, reforms, and its state-centric register. Policy-wise, the design of new institutions involved controversies about what kind of justice could be aspired to, reanimating long-standing conceptual disputes in the field such as those between truth and justice. And the practice of criminal accountability in Western courts involved debates about ownership and meaningfulness. Syrian engagement with international justice initiatives was constructive, but not sanguine or acritical. For some, TJ was inherently limited.