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ABSTRACT
Interest has recently increased in transformative justice. While transformative justice research offers an important contribution to transitional justice, I discuss challenges in its implementation. Drawing on research on affected communities and practitioners at the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación in Peru, I question whether there are tensions between addressing micro and macro causes of conflict and in representing and integrating survivors and ex-combatants. While scholars and practitioners have importantly linked transformative justice to the reconfiguration of macro socio-economic structural injustices, more attention is needed to micro drivers of conflict. I outline a tension for a desire for more established punitive justice (prosecution of perpetrators and reparations for survivors) and the need to engage and reintegrate ex-combatants. These challenges are acute in conflict transitions, where transitional justice has taken on more expansive goals of peace-building. More recognition is also important of lingering legacies of violence and practical impediments.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Denisa Kostovicova and Jim Hughes for putting together a stimulating workshop at the LSE to prepare this paper and for their invaluable feedback. I also thank the editors of Ethnic and Racial Studies for their support of this Special Issue. In Peru, I am very grateful for the support of Anne Carbon, Ruth Moisés Ríos, Salomón Lerner Febres and Rosemary Lerner Rizo Patron, Juana García Blásquez, Félix Reátegui, Pilar Coll Torrente, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Rolando Ames Cobián. I warmly thank the Comisión de Salud Mental de Ayacucho and El Instituto de Democracia y Derechos Humanos de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. I would additionally like to thank Benjamin Wolf, Kirsten Ainley, Chris Brown, Carmen Gayoso, Rachel Kerr, Vivienne Jabri, Jelena Obradović-Wochnik, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Laura Martin, Joana Quinn, and Gearoid Millar. I am also grateful for fruitful conversations and feedback from the King’s College London War Crimes Research Group, a Critical Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice roundtable at the British International Studies Association Convention (2015), and a helpful panel at the International Studies Association Annual Convention (2016) for furthering my thinking on this subject.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. In this article I use the term “survivor” or afectado (affected one in Spanish) to correspond to how many who experienced violence in Peru chose to identify themselves. These individuals and communities frequently rejected the term “victim”. I only use “victim” when directly engaging with institutions of secondary literature that uses this term”.
2. Some of the data from this article are drawn from my book length study, Competing Memories: Truth and Reconciliation in Sierra Leone and Peru (Citation2017). The book examines how truth commissions have employed wide-ranging procedures across cases and offers a conceptualization of various levels of reconciliation and its links to transitional justice.
3. Conflict transformation is often associated with Lederach (Citation2003, 14), who offers an expansive definition: “ … creating constructive change processes that reduce violence, increase justice in direct interaction and social structures, and respond to real-life problems in human relationships.” In the article I refer to conflict transformation more simply as policies that address and remedy the root causes of conflict.
4. I distinguish transitional justice as formal and informal institutions and practices to address legacies of violence during transitions from civil war or authoritarian rule from transformative justice as an agenda linking to these institutions. Transformative justice, as I understand it, is a set of normative orientations and expectations.
5. For instance, in Peru, political scientists have often focused on macro structural economic and political root causes of war, while a more ethnographically oriented and often anthropological literature has examined the micro drivers of participation in insurgency.
6. See Philpott (Citation2012, 23–24) on implicit normative assumptions about conflict resolution in transitional justice.
7. The Sierra Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commission had the highest participation of ex-combatants of truth commissions and separate hearings for children.
8. See CVR Working Group. See also Personal interview, Dr Salomón Lerner Febres, Lima, Peru, 10 February 2011.
9. See CVR Working Group. See also Personal interview, Dr Salomón Lerner Febres, Lima, Peru, 10 February 2011. See also personal interview, Félix Reátegui, CVR Researcher, Lima, Peru, 1 December 2011.
10. Personal interview, Rolando Ames Cobían, Lima, Peru, 7 February 2011. See also Root (Citation2012, 85).
11. The CVR Working Group Minutes.
12. CVR Report and personal interview, Jairo Rivas, Consejo de Reperaciones, Lima, Peru, 19 December 2010.
13. See Theidon’s (Citation2000) discussion of the micro politics of reconciliation and reintegration.
14. Personal interview, José Coronel Aguirre, Ayacucho, Peru, 12 January 2011.
15. Personal interview, Tanya Molina Morote, forensic anthropologist and regional coordinator of EPAF, Ayacucho, Peru, 5 October 2010.
16. See the South African Barometer report.
17. UNSCH Law Student Focus Group, Ayacucho, Peru, 21 October 2010.
18. Focus group with widows, Cayara, Ayacucho, Peru, 13 October 2010.
19. Personal interview, Yuber Alcarón Quispe, ANFASEP official and lawyer, Ayacucho, Peru, 12 October 2010.
20. Personal interviews, Lerner and Ames.
21. For example, the CVR required insurgents to “auto-criticize” before testifying – to renounce the movement and their role in it (Friedman Citation2017). The CVR also characterized the Shining Path as a terrorist movement unlike the Sierra Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, for instance, which abstained from judging the legitimacy of the Revolutionary United Front.
22. Personal interviews, Coronel. Focus group with female afectados, Cayara, Peru, 13 October 2010.
23. UNSCH Anthropology Student Focus Group, Ayacucho, Peru, 21 October 2010.
24. See Martin (Citation2016) for a discussion of everyday normalization.
25. See Ntsebeza (Citation2000) and Hollis (Citation2015).
26. For example, COSMA (mental health commission of Ayacucho), was established as a mental health clinic in Ayacucho in response to the CVR’s recommendations for mental health reparations.
27. Personal interview, Carlos Rodrigo Infante Yupanqui, Ayacucho, Peru, 4 November 2010. Infante is a faculty member at the UNSCH and director of the journal, Con Sentido. His father, journalist Octavio Infante García, was murdered in the Uchuraccay massacre. See also Theidon (Citation2004).
28. For instance, whether this was a civil war, an armed conflict, an insurgency, or terrorism and counter-terrorism.
29. Some refused to engage with the individual motivations of insurgents altogether as they saw them as illegitimate or for fear of legitimizing them.
30. On women’s mobilization and the links between personal and political drivers, see Ní Aoláin (Citation2013) and Richter-Devroe (Citation2009).
31. In Ayacucho, university students and faculty face a heavily censored atmosphere, particularly in terms of permitted disciplines offered at universities and subjects related to the Shining Path.
32. For some victims’ organizations, the CVR should have employed a Shining Path commissioner and put more emphasis on the status of ex-Shining Path prisoners and military disappearances.
33. Personal interviews, Coronel; and Pilar Coll Torrente, Lima, Peru, 3 February 2011. See also Theidon (Citation2004).
34. See Gavilán Sánchez (Citation2012) for an account of a former child Shining Path militant.
35. UNSCH Law and Anthropology Focus Groups and personal interview, Manuel Mayorga, UNSCH, Anthropology Department, Ayacucho, Peru, 5 November 2010.
36. In this regard, Sri Lanka is a similar recent example.