The Politics of Knowledge: Transitional Justice and the Research, Policy, Practice Interface

Transitional justice, like other peacebuilding endeavours, strives to create change in the world and to produce knowledge that is useful (Goetschel and Pfluger 2014: 55). But the politics of how this knowledge is produced, shared and rendered legitimate depends upon the relationships between different epistemic communities, the way in which transitional justice has developed as a field, and the myriad contexts in which it is embedded at local, national and international levels. In particular, forms of ‘expert’ knowledge tend to be legal, foreign and based on models to be replicated elsewhere (Jones 2015). Work on epistemic communities of peacebuilding (Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu 2014) which operate as “sites of a constant struggle over how to define which qualifies as valid knowledge” (Bush and Duggan 2014: 233) can be usefully brought to bear on transitional justice, speaking to current debates in the literature on positionality, justice ‘from below’, marginalisation and knowledge imperialism. Through the ongoing research project Knowledge for Peace: Understanding Research, Policy, Practice Synergies we are reflecting on how the politics of knowledge production shapes what is considered to be possible in practice and policy. By the politics of knowledge production I refer to the processes by which knowledge comes to be regarded as knowledge. In this exploratory paper I begin to scope what this means for research and how transitional justice interventions take shape empirically. First I outline key contours of the knowledge and transitional justice intersection: the transitional justice ‘industry’, the importance of cases and models, the challenges of attribution and measurement, and the dominance of certain frames of reference and knowledge producing positions. Second I reflect on the implications of this for what practices and policies tend to be designed and implemented and point to ways forward in expanding, challenging and perhaps breaking down boundaries between knowledge communities. I argue that it is only through understanding this politics of knowledge production that we can hope to generate transitional justice interventions which will have long-term impacts such as contributing to the prevention of future violence.