Knowledge Production in Transitional Justice

Abstract

Knowledge production in and for security, development and peacebuilding policies has increasingly attracted academic attention over the last years. This trend has been facilitated by scholars’ movements between academic and policy cycles – often as freelance or part-time consultants who critically reflect on their experiences. Such reflections usually challenge the straightforwardness of the idea that policy-making has become more ‘problem-focused’ and ‘evidence-based’. The trend towards studying knowledge production has also coincided with various recent ‘turns’ in IR and critical security studies, including the ethnographic and practice turns. It is about understanding how evidence and expertise are shaped by relations of power that are often embedded in organisational routines and seemingly self-evident practice. Although these perspectives are also highly relevant with regard to the field of transitional justice, they have not yet been widely applied to the study of transitional justice instruments and processes. An exception is Nancy Combs’ study of the evidence supporting international criminal convictions 'Fact-Finding without Facts' (2010). But knowledge production is certainly not limited to criminal prosecutions. It also takes place in preparation for and in the actual operations of, for example, truth commissions, reparation programmes and various forms of reform and reconciliation activities and projects. ‘Best practices’ and other types of standardised transitional justice expertise are developed and disseminated by specialized think tanks, NGOs and departments within international organisations. Although these influential transnational knowledge networks do not fully eliminate possibilities for alternative approaches, they certainly shape how transitional justice is done and imagined across the globe. In addition to being shaped by expertise, transitional justice is also generative of ‘policy-relevant’ knowledge. For example, truth commission reports are expected to provide authoritative accounts on the dynamics and causes of conflict, violence and poverty which tend to become policy problems to be addressed by national governments and/or by donor-funded peacebuilding and development projects. Also, transitional justice is accompanied by influential policy-related meta-concepts such as ‘post-conflict’ and ‘transition’ that structure how activists and domestic as well as international policy-makers can ‘know’ a respective context and legitimately act within it. This panel brings together contributions that analyse concrete processes of knowledge production in different cases of transitional justice and develop conceptual lenses for studying knowledge production in transitional justice.