Conflict as a Time that is Past? Engaging with Resistance to Transitional Justice in Cambodia

With transitional justice processes having become an integral part of liberal peacebuilding, critical transitional justice scholarship has started to engage with critiques of the ‚liberal peace’. The concept of resistance is mobilised in this regard to study agency, legitimacy and power in transitional justice beyond an international/local divide. Yet resistance also highlights how transitional justice frames conflict as a ‘time that is past’, thereby extracting questions of justice from the political realm and rendering them amenable to external, technical and legal interventions. Claims for justice which do not reproduce such an approach to conflict may then become excluded from transitional justice. This paper proposes to analyse resistance as a way of decentring the study of transitional justice and engaging with contested politics in contexts of ongoing human rights violations. Based upon qualitative fieldwork, it analyses the case study of Cambodia where the state-sanctioned transitional justice process –the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia– has been established about a decade after the deployment of the far-reaching United Nations peacebuilding intervention (UNTAC). This paper therefore also asks whether the current transitional justice intervention is embedded in similar practices of pacification or rather has enabled the creation of different spaces for contestation and resistance.