Problematising ‘the local’ as a dominant way of knowing in Transitional Justice

This contribution interrogates the largely undiscussed assumptions about positionality embedded within the scholarship about the ‘local turn’ in transitional justice (TJ) by asking the question, what happens when context-based academics and practitioners, otherwise designated as ‘the local’, are acknowledged as producers of knowledge about conflict, atrocity, and justice? By posing this question, this paper aims to examine the problematic ways that the ‘local turn’ in (TJ) ends up reducing, simplifying, trivialising, and erasing, the rich, context-based, and complexly political processes of knowledge production that occur within (post)conflict settings. While driven by noble attempts at decentring western perspectives on international criminal law, Eurocentric ideas about justice, conflict, and democratic turns, the scholarship that has emerged within ‘the local turn’ insufficiently reflects upon the sort of positionality that transpires in the labelling and category ‘the local’, in TJ. Furthermore, this author argues that ‘the local’ is a largely undefined and general concept which inherently conveys a sense of interchangeability of whatever the concept subsumes. As such, whatever is designated as being ‘the local’ is stripped of its depth and nuance. Finally, conceptualising experiences of violent conflict experiences, and visions of justice as ‘the local’, not only perpetuates colonial visions of places and peoples as ahistorical, but also fails to turn the attention away from finding a purer and more representative ‘local’, to the politics of southern and northern co-production and the ways that they inflect the kind of knowledge about (post)conflict contexts that is produced. Given that the ‘local turn’ has been largely the concern of North-based academics studying (post)conflict contexts in the Global South, the question of positionality is central to problematising ‘the local’ as a dominant way of knowing in TJ.