Justice on the Road: Everyday Trustbuilding Through Diaspora Car-Pooling

Scholarship on the intersection of diaspora and transitional justice has become an increasingly flourishing field. Meanwhile the turn to focusing on local actors and bottom-up initiatives in transitional justice has long been established. Its focus often lies on the influence of conflict-generated diaspora actors and transitional justice initiatives, driven by local actors in collaboration or in contestation with diaspora actors. Diaspora actors pursue transitional justice with international organizations or non-state actors in an effort to bypass their home states. Other research has focused on mechanisms of repression that diaspora actors pursuing transitional justice might become part of. Under these circumstances, the homeland environment, where the transitional justice is being pursued, has been examined and portrayed as one where multiple narratives compete against one another and where politicization of the everyday has only fostered divided societies. This article examines a new perspective of the diaspora and transitional justice paradigm, that of post-conflict generated diaspora as a result of a lack of transitional justice, widely understood. In the Balkans, mass migration waves, particularly of young people and those who are highly skilled, has led to what has recently even been termed a ‘demographic crisis.’ Many have chosen to leave their homelands as a result of political, economic, and social stagnation, often settling in nearby EU countries for education and work pursuits. This paper examines the ways in which they create new narratives about their homeland in relation to transitional justice with their migration experience as a major driver. The paper analyzes how these narratives respond to, reframe, and in turn reflect on the art of narration in post-conflict and transitional societies, attempting to self-heal, shape identities, and address dominant narratives. It does this through an innovative Facebook based ethnography of a diaspora car-pooling group, including participant observation of car-pooling between Austria and Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I argue that post-conflict diaspora members experience their migration as changing their contexts in order to distance themselves from the homeland where narratives remain dominated by ethno-national political elites. I argue that they are, through everyday interactions with one another, particularly on the road through car-pooling arranged through a social media group, contributing to creating alternative narratives that are more open to transitional justice goals. This article examines the importance of every-day trustbuilding in the pursuit of transitional justice, and the relevance of diaspora in helping to foster it in countries where the proverbial roads to transitional justice are still being paved.