Transitional Justice Entrepreneurs and Victims’ Agency: The Case of Kosovo

The emerging norm of restorative justice as an effective substitution or complement of retributive justice has witnessed the rise of transitional justice entrepreneurs, both transnationally and nationally. Although grounded in different fields, these actors have developed a common language and refined a transitional justice toolkit that crams truth, justice, reconciliation, stability, democracy, peace and accountability. Focusing on the current attempt to deploy this toolkit in Kosovo, this paper is an ethnographic investigation on how other actors - whether human rights activists or victims, who are the very beneficiaries of transitional justice - understand it and react to it. Kosovo is both a case of frozen conflict and an ambitious experiment in state building. In this context, there is an overdetermination of the political aspects of transitional justice, with its promise to manage conflicts by promoting reconciliation, and higher visibility/influence of international actors -- whether they are governmental or not. It is a context that allows to better test problematic notions that are already part of the broader theoretical debate on transitional justice: the use of its toolkit to promote the social engineering of a seemingly impossible political reconciliation (Hazan, 2010), and the sensitivity of transitional justice professional to victims’ agency (Shaw et al. ed. 2010; Hinton, ed. 2011; Orentlicher 2007). Pierre Hazan, Judging War, Judging History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Alexander Lanan Hinton ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence. (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2011) Diane Orentlicher, “Settling Accounts Revisited: Reconciling Global Normas with Local Agency,” The International Journal of Transitional Justice 1 (2007): 10-22. Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf eds., with Pierre Hazan. Localizing Transitional Justice. Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).