On transitional justice and constraints: a political economy approach to the economic and social dimensions of the transitional justice process in Tunisia

This paper studies the inclusion of economic and social rights in the transitional justice process in Tunisia. Traditionally, transitional justice has focused on gross human rights violations of civil and political rights marginalizing debates on the economic and social dimensions. While the debates about its inclusion have gained momentum over the past few years, when turning into the practical field, the mechanisms of transitional justice rarely include economic and social rights, and, in the cases they are included, implementation has been minimal. In cases in which the conflict that led to the transition had an economic and social nature, the lack of attention of those dimensions in the transition and the continuity of the“politics as usual”in the fields of economic policy and development have had as a consequence the repetition of the human rights violations and socioeconomic exclusion that led to the transition. Those dimensions have received a great deal of attention from scholars and practitioners, however, they have been generally considered as a technical problem: Lack of funds, time or expertise, and the problem of overloading transitional justice programs have been common arguments against its inclusion. According to those contributions, it seems that the theoretical advances in the discipline are irreconcilable with the practical constraints of transitional justice in practice. In this study I will address those dimensions from a political economy perspective according to which the inclusion of economic and social rights in transitional justice is far from being a technical issue but a decision that stem from the hegemony of the liberal project of formal democracy and neoliberal capitalism. From that perspective, special attention is paid to the characterization of social change as a struggle between different social forces; the role of external actors and current legal structures and regimes in shaping domestic political, social and economic change; and the role of social forces that go beyond the critic to propose different alternatives to use the transformative potential of transitional justice to achieve social justice and more egalitarian societies. Thereby, this approach could contribute to the debate on the constraints of transitional justice and the calls to enlarge the issues covered by transitional justice processes (economic and social rights, structural violence, and development) as well as shed some new light on the alternative solutions that have been proposed. To conduct this research, the paper will focus on the case of the transitional justice process in Tunisia that will be analyzed in light of the above mentioned dimensions. The selection of the case of Tunisia is based in the fact that its transitional justice law includes innovative provisions that address socioeconomic concerns that were key elements in the transition as corruption and the marginalization and exclusion of regions.