Justice Visions

What role does documentation play in the pursuit of truth and justice in context of ongoing violence? In this new Justice Visions podcast episode, we take up this question by exploring documentation practices in Mexico, a context marked by an ongoing and deeply complex crisis of enforced disappearances. With more than 133,000 people officially registered as disappeared and numbers continuing to rise, families have become central actors in the search for truth and justice.In this episode, co-hosts Amanda Rossini Martins and Büşra Cebeci speak with Anna Karolina Chimiak, whose work has been closely grounded in accompanying families of the disappeared since 2016. Drawing on both practice and research, Anna reflects on how families of the disappeared have placed documentation at the core of their strategies in a context marked by state-criminal collusion and the lack of effective institutional responses.Zooming in on grassroots initiatives, the conversation highlights how families have stepped in to fill profound institutional gaps. In a context where violence is ongoing and state responses remain limited, fragmented, and ineffective, families have developed their own grassroots justice efforts by organising searches for the disappeared, mobilising collectively, advocating for policy reform, and documenting both the disappearance and the lives of their loved ones.As Anna explains, these documentation practices are multifaceted: they range from personal archives and community databases to search flyers, memorialisation initiatives, and artistic expressions. Documentation takes many forms.“Families document to generate the information that institutions failed to produce and to build the evidence needed for search, for truth and for justice processes. But their objectives go far beyond that. […] Documentation is not only a technical activity, but also an act of resistance, of care, and of collective organisation.”These practices also sustain memory, challenge official narratives, and make visible patterns of violence that might otherwise remain hidden. Through documentation, they build evidence and push for accountability beyond national borders. At the same time, as Anna notes:“Families of the disappeared in Mexico rarely invoke the language of transitional justice explicitly. Instead, they mobilise narratives grounded in its core pillars: truth, justice, memory, non-recurrence, and reparation, adapting these frameworks to a shifting and often adverse context that they face.”In doing so, families are not only responding to the crisis; they are actively reshaping what justice looks like in a context where violence persists and formal transitional processes remain limited. Their work expands the boundaries of transitional justice, grounding it in lived experience and everyday practices of love and care.

The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this second episode of these miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization efforts through embroidery practices in Shatila camp in Beirut. Since the increasing repression by the Assad regime and the war in Syria, there has been a large influx of refugees into Shatila, originally a Palestinian refugee camp. Our colleague Sofie Verclyte recently defended her PhD project ‘Migrating heritage’, and developed a co-creative project with women in Shatila. In that project, she explored the role of embroidery practices in the context of conflict and displacement. Tine De Strooper and Brigitte Herremans spoke to Sofie about the practice of embroidery, and how it has been used in the Syrian context, as a way to remember, and an important element in the broader struggle for justice. While embroidery might not seem directly reconcilable with a struggle for justice, it has a long history of narrating lived experiences. There are many instances where practitioners use their skill to remember and transmit lived experiences of harm. As Sofie highlights: “this is also the case in Shatila, where embroidery, rooted in the region’s rich textile tradition, plays a central role in the lives of makers, typically women.” Traditionally, these women often passed down their craft through intergenerational mentorship, often as a form of storytelling. As such, embroidery is a way to transmit knowledge, to express lived experiences, and therefore also a way to preserve memories and to prevent forgetting. As Boushra, one of the artists with whom Sofie worked states: “For me, embroidery is a revival of memory. It prevents me from forgetting the experiences I went through, such as war, displacement and being a refugee. Often experiences are harsh, whether due to war, displacement, or life circumstances.” Boushra emphasizes that she sees embroidery as a form of communication, a language for sharing experiences. This perspective highlights the significance of nonverbal practices in capturing and conveying experiences of harm. In a context where formal memorialization initiatives are absent because of the ongoing injustices and the context of the entrenched non-transition, informal memorialization efforts can be seen as a way to express, share, and resist memories of injustice. These private practices preserve unarchived and previously unrecorded memories, but also, and often simultaneously, they make it possible to imagine a more just future.

Between 1956 and 2011, Tunisia endured decades of authoritarian rule under Presidents Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian Revolution in 2011 led to the ousting of Ben Ali and catalysed the start of the institutional transitional justice process. Yet, mobilisation against authoritarian rule and the curtailment of basic freedoms also predated the establishment of this formal process. In this episode, our guests Houcine Bouchiba, Hamza Ben Nasr and Leila Bejaoui discuss how the participation and activism of victims, supported by victims’ organisations and civil society, profoundly shaped the transitional justice process in Tunisia. Survivors and activists have played a pivotal role in pushing for accountability, supporting truth-seeking, and advocating for reform – despite facing numerous obstacles and waning public and political will. Houcine, Hamza and Leila speak to the realizations and setbacks of the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD) and the Specialized Criminal Chambers, whilst illustrating the importance of foregrounding gendered harms and socio-economic demands (for employment, and livelihoods) in the Tunisian context. At the same time, the events of July 2021 have caused widespread concern about the country’s transitional justice trajectory. This also prompted our guests to reflect on how the current reality affects victims’ experiences and trajectories, and how it pushes victims’ organisations and civil society to reorganize in order to revitalize justice efforts and resist autocratization. This episode was realized in collaboration with Avocats Sans Frontières (Lawyers Without Borders), Tunis branch.

The new episode of Justice Visions takes a distinct approach. In response to the escalating violence in Palestine and Israel following the Hamas attacks on October 7th and Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip, we felt compelled to address these critical issues of justice and accountability. Our focus today are these international crimes occurring in an environment where impunity prevails.

The final episode of the Justice Visions miniseries on the revolutionary potential of transitional justice zooms in on the relationship between protest, artistic practices and transitional justice in South Sudan. This might seem not be the most obvious choice for such a miniseries, as transitional justice is a relatively new concept in the world’s youngest nation, which has endured decades of violence. South Sudan gained independence in 2011, following more than 20 years of civil war, and subsequently experienced another civil war from 2013 to 2020. In response to the legacies of these conflicts, both formal and informal transitional justice initiatives have been established. While the peace agreements put forward four transitional justice measures, none of these foreseen measures became operational. In the absence of functioning formal transitional justice mechanisms, the artistic realm has emerged as an incubator for contestation and resistance. We are exploring the way in which artistic practices further both TJ and protest with Sayra van den Berg. Sayra has recently conducted fieldwork in South Sudan, focusing on contemporary artistic and cultural expressions, notably in the domain of visual arts and music. She describes how several artists share goals with the transitional justice advocacy community, even if they do not self-identify as TJ actors, arguing that, While I don't necessarily think that there is an intrinsic benefit in adopting the language of transitional justice for these artistic spaces, I do think that there's a very real relational benefit to being a part of this wider transitional justice community that using that language grants access to. Delving into the vibrant artistic landscape, she describes arts’ potential for innovation in TJ spaces and discussions. Scholars and practitioners can act upon this: The increasingly critical turn in scholarship around formal mechanisms of transitional justice is a call to action for all of us in this incredibly fluid and evolving field of research, to locate the practice of transitional justice in the spaces where its goals are centralized and not merely within a rather static and narrow set of formal mechanisms.

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast is a second episode of a miniseries that looks into the revolutionary potential of transitional justice in current protest. In this episode we examine the wave of recent protests and severe state violence in Peru. We link the aftermath of leftist ex-President Pedro Castillo’s failed coup d’état on December 7th 2022 and people’s demands to Peru’s former transitional justice process. This was a response to the country’s violent internal conflict between the 1980s and 2000s and concluded in 2003. With our two studio guests, Sarah Kerremans and Rocio Silva Santisteban, we unearth a continuum of violence that helps to understand why this is happening today, why indigenous and rural communities find themselves at the centre of the conflict and how this links to Peru’s extractivist economic model and the country’s many ongoing ecoterritorial conflicts. During her recent field work in Peru, Sarah witnessed the vitriolic attacks by institutions and mainstream media against indigenous groups: ‘What struck me most was the racist dimension of that endlessly repeated message that they wanted to take over Lima and the attempts to silence critical voices.’ Protesters in Peru have been coined as terrorists to delegitimize them and their demands during the current protests, as well as in many conflicts regarding extractivist projects. Rocío Silva-Santisteban narrates how the current situation is unprecedented: “It is a situation that in some way or another shows that there is a great political malaise, a great malaise of the sectors that never before in the country had been represented by one of their own.” She points to the failed transitional justice process: “These are the same demands for justice, for truth, for memory, for reparation that were not fulfilled 20 years ago.” However, she stills feels inspired by all these people organizing, “despite the difficulties, despite the harshness of the situation, despite the impunity, despite the fact that the state doesn't care, they take the streets, they mobilize, they make themselves being heard.”

In May 2022, Ferdinand ‘Bong Bong’ Marcos, the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos won the presidential elections in the Philippines. The vice-presidential elections were won by Sara Duterte, daughter of the former authoritarian president Rodrigo Duterte. What does the election of the son of a former dictator tell us about the Philippines’ transitional justice process? What to make of the historical revisionism that facilitated this electoral outcome, in light of transitional justice’s concern with truth and memorialization? The episode highlights that, while many activists and justice actors were initially focusing on the recovering the ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses, and later on fighting the extra-judicial killings happening as part of Duterte’s violent war-on-drugs, an entire campaign aimed at erasing the violence and crimes perpetrated by the Marcos family from the public discourse was shaping up under the surface. The interviews underline the impact of this of historical revisionism and the difficulty in combatting it in a context where there was never a widely shared and state-sanctioned historical narrative about the violence and economic crimes perpetrated by the Marcos regime. In the absence of a formal truth commission or institutionalized memorialization efforts, developing a shared understanding of the violence that transpired has been difficult. At the same time, the current campaign of historical revisionism, while commonly being traced to the Marcos family, is mostly being waged on social media platforms in a highly decentralized manner, making it difficult to develop an encompassing strategy to counter it. Is transitional justice powerless in the face of such a reality, or can innovations and creative approaches adequately respond to this situation and maybe even open up avenues for rethinking truth and memorialization efforts in other transitional justice contexts? In this episode of Justice Visions, we talk to Ruben Carranza of the International Center for Transitional Justice, and to Chuck Crisanto, of the Philippine Memorial Commission about what to make of this situation if we look at it through the lens of transitional justice.

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast expands on historical truth-seeking initiatives in the (post-)colonial state. In this miniseries co-hosted by postdoctoral research fellow Dr. Cira Pallí-Asperó, we look into formal and informal truth initiatives in European countries dealing with settler and overseas colonial legacies. In this episode, we zoom in on Portugal to discuss decolonisation in a context of explicit glorification of the imperial and colonial past. What kind of initiatives have been taken place? Led by who and for which purpose? Our guest is Dr. Bruno Sena Martins, researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. First and foremost, he stresses, the anti-colonial struggle is not something of the past: “it is a mission for this generation to (…) decolonize the present and to decolonize Europe”. In Portugal, critical consciousness about the colonial past has only recently been shaping up in the public debate with the establishment of different initiatives led by civil society organisations and by minority groups of people of African descent, with a significant role of academia. Dr. Bruno Sena Martins talks about what kind of openings and opportunities have been created to address the legacies of the Portuguese colonial past; and how civil society organisations have been advocating to redress issues of inequality, recognition, social, racial, and historical justice. “This is a movement where different people, different actors claim that it is important to look at the past in a critical perspective. It is important to acknowledge that the colonial violence is still with us”.