Initially ‘the’ transitional justice agenda and discourse comes as a shortlist of macro level concepts such as; reconciliation, establishing truth, justice, and a search for criminal accountability for perpetrators. These concepts and projects based on them as for example Truth Commissions, reconciliation projects, perpetrator trials, construction of memorials, need to bring answers on how to address the violation of human rights and other recent gruesome experiences and they should bring guarantees that such crimes will not recur (“never again”). Most research on post-conflict societies focuses on initiatives at this macro-level. Without doubt, the macro topics still deserve to be addressed, but until now little has been said about victims'' views on and hopes for these initiatives, and about effects of the ways in which ‘victimhood’ is framed in a legal vocabulary on victims. I will discuss a specific effect of the development of these legal definitions. Many Peruvian victim-survivors perceive the legal proceedings and their outcome as a basis for recognition of their experiences in the violent recent history of Peru (1980-2000) and for reparations claims. In Peru, however, this expectation is not realized. As a result the victims experience yet another degrading. This leads to a somewhat paradoxical result: the legal recognition of victimhood leads to a re-victimizing of the victims. By concentrating on this topic this paper will help to broaden the micro level perspective on societies and individuals in post-conflict situations. It is based on several dozens of interviews with people belonging to varied formal victim categories in Peru.
