Reassessing the focus of transitional justice: the need to move structural and cultural violence to the centre

Abstract

After over six decades of evolution, transitional justice remains focused on courts and commissions, evidenced by the allocation of international attention and resources. This is understandable given that courts and commissions are ideal platforms to hold perpetrators to account. While violent individuals and events can be addressed through courts and commission, what cannot be adequately addressed is the structural and cultural violence that makes mass atrocities possible, and remains intact in spite of truth and accountability. Structural and cultural violence manifests as systemic vulnerability and dehumanization, and it is this type of built-in violence that continues to plague countries where transitional justice has been pursued, for example the criminalization and repression of communities in South Africa, or the forced evictions that occur daily throughout Cambodia. This article argues that it is this type of violence which should become the central focus of transitional justice.

Notes

¹ Peace scholar Johan Galtung devised the violence triangle to explain three types of violence: direct, structural and cultural. Direct violence is the overt manifestation of violence; the actual violent act. Structural violence may be best understood as the suffering and vulnerability caused by the structures in place: discrimination, poverty, marginalization and extraordinary consolidation of power. Cultural violence may be best understood as the attitudes, symbols and values that legitimize direct and structural violence: personal and/or societal support for, or acceptance of, human suffering.

² This article includes many references to societies or social spaces. By ‘society’ and ‘social space’ this article is referring generally to interpersonal and intergroup life within or directly related to a given context, normatively distinguished by state boundaries. This does not suggest that the society or social space can be treated as a generalized homogeneous entity; rather, ‘society’ or ‘social space’ refers to the sum of endlessly different human relationships that exist in the given framework or system.

³ The term ‘dehumanization’ is used throughout the article. However, in some cases the term ‘infrahumanization’—a lesser form of dehumanization—may be more appropriate. Infrahumanization refers to ‘the denial to an individual or group of some of the characteristics that make us human, rendering the target as less than human, if not wholly non-human’ (Castano and Giner-Sorolla 2006, 804). Collective infrahumanization and dehumanization are the product of a social identity predicated on an ‘in-group’—those who are like us—and an ‘out-group’—them.

⁴ Katzenstein (2003) provides an analysis of the atrocities that occurred in East Timor and a critical analysis of the East Timor tribunal.

⁵ Transitional justice has a significant impact on the media, and the media have an equally significant impact on the transitional justice modality, making the dissemination of a news-friendly discourse a must (Laplante and Phenicie 2009).

⁶ Critics of transitional justice prosecution often point to the highly politicized process of determining when, what and to whom transitional justice applies to produces ‘a fairly narrow interpretation of violence within a somewhat artificial timeframe’ (Nagy 2008). For example, the slaughter effected by Henry Kissinger's orders—‘a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia … [a]nything that flies, on anything that moves’—won't be judged by the Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodia. Despite playing a significant role in Khmer Rouge recruiting efforts and the frustrated, hateful rhetoric that was instilled in Cambodian society, neither Kissinger nor Nixon nor Operation Menu are adequately accounted for in the historical framework produced by transitional justice (Owen and Kiernan 2006).

⁷ Inequality in South Africa is exemplary of structural violence, and the potency of this systemic discrimination is a significant variable in South Africa's standing among the worst of the worst in terms of the prevalence of violent crimes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Mullen

Matthew Mullen is a research assistant at the Institute for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Mahidol University. He is currently completing his doctoral degree in Human Rights and Peace Studies. His recent publications relate to the rights of non-citizens, and unconventional pursuits of change in Myanmar.