![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Transitional justice, which is typically part of a liberal peacebuilding strategy, often seems distant, ineffective or even counter-productive. The concept of resilience, to which transitional justice discourses and scholarship have remained relatively indifferent, appears useful to explore justice initiatives in conflict or post-conflict situations. This article argues that much can be gained from better understanding the relevance of – and significant risks associated with – resilience thinking in this context. Through a critical approach to resilience, and embedded within a legal-pluralist framework, it examines some of the ways of dealing with political violence, with a particular focus on the Central African Republic.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Ana E. Juncos and Jonathan Joseph as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Philipp Kastner is a Senior Lecturer at the Law School of the University of Western Australia. He holds degrees from McGill University, Canada (D.C.L. and LL.M.) and the University of Innsbruck, Austria (Dr. iur. and Mag. iur). He researches and teaches in the areas of the resolution of armed conflicts and transitional justice, international criminal law, public international law and legal pluralism. Publications include Legal Normativity in the Resolution of Internal Armed Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and International Criminal Justice in bello? (Martinus Nijhoff, 2012). He is also the editor of International Criminal Law in Context (Routledge, 2018).
Notes
1 For a notable exception, which does, however, not engage very critically with the concept of resilience, see Wiebelhaus-Brahm (Citation2017).
2 Tellingly, the term ‘transitional justice’ is employed twice in this report of 57 pages; ‘resilience’ is used 39 times.
3 An explicit example consists in a five-year study funded by the European Research Council, the ‘ultimate objective’ of which is ‘to develop new ways of doing transitional justice that potentially foster resilience’ (Clark Citation2019, 270).
4 Most of this draws on the manifestos ‘what resilience means’, available on the webpage of the journal Resilience at <http://www.resiliencejournal.org/what-resilience-means/manifestos/>.
5 It should be noted that several offenders have been tried nationally. General Andjilo (anti-balaka), for instance, was convicted in 2018 before the Bangui Criminal Court (FIDH Citation2018; United Nations Citation2018, para. 41).
6 There are different, and even conflicting, uses of the term ‘resilience’; in the context of disaster management in the United States, for instance, greater emphasis has been placed on engineering understandings of resilience and the associated ability to ‘bounce back’ than on ecological and psychological understandings (Grove Citation2018).
7 In a United States Institute of Peace report, resilience has been defined as ‘a socioecological system’s (community, society, state) response to violence and capacity to both maintain peace in the event of a violent shock or long-term stressor and resist the pernicious impacts of violence on societal norms and relationships’ (Van Metre and Calder Citation2016).
8 As I have argued similarly with respect to peace negotiations seeking to resolve internal armed conflicts, one of the main challenges in this context consists in re-creating a shared social-political-legal space, with a return to the pre-conflict situation and its conditions – a full ‘recovery’ – hardly being possible (Kastner Citation2015).
9 The straightforward consideration of resilience thinking as part of a neoliberal logic has been denounced as not providing ‘enough coherence for critique’ (Schmidt Citation2015, 403), and the ‘alignment between neoliberalism and resilience’ assessed as ‘far more contingent than many critics allow’ (Grove Citation2018, 270). Early pragmatist theorisations can indeed offer useful insights, as Schmidt notes, but it seems that the way in which the concept of resilience has unfolded in practice in various policy areas over the past decades does share many elements with neoliberal thinking. Moreover, a need to confirm empirically the connections between resilience discourses, the implementation of resilience policies and claims that resilience is part of a neoliberal strategy has been identified (Vilcan Citation2017).
10 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998), article 17.
11 For more information on this situation, see https://www.icc-cpi.int/car.
12 It should be noted here that it may be useful for analytical and practical purposes to distinguish between individual, societal, institutional and state resilience, among others when trying to imagine transitional justice initiatives and the challenges they are likely to encounter. However, there are obviously many links between – and overlap of – the different forms of resilience, and neat and prescriptive distinctions do not seem warranted for the purposes of this analysis. In fact, one of the very premises of resilience thinking is to connect the personal to the systemic and organisational (Neocleous Citation2012).
13 This language draws on the World Bank (Citation2011, 101).
14 See, for instance, Quinn (Citation2009) on Haiti’s failed Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
15 For a useful study of the importance of group identity on the perception of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, see David (Citation2014).