Margins as Method Grassroots Justice Initiatives and the Expanding Horizons of Transitional Justice

Transitional justice is often understood to refer to a set of formal justice mechanisms (such as criminal proceedings, truth commissions, reparation programs, or institutional reform) for addressing legacies of large-scale violence. As two decades of transitional justice scholarship and practice have shown however, these formal mechanisms are only part of the story. A lot of the justice work that happens during or after periods of massive human rights violations emerges from the bottom up and is driven by grassroots justice actors. This can include initiatives like unofficial truth projects, citizen-driven memory work, or traditional justice initiatives, among many other options. Acknowledging these justice initiatives as an integral part of what we typically refer to as transitional justice offers a much richer picture of the dense ecosystem of justice initiatives installed during and after massive human rights violations. It also, however, creates a range of definitional challenges. Should an initiative that uses the language of transitional justice but that adopts entirely different modalities or definitions of justice be considered as transitional justice? Or an initiative that takes place while conflict is ongoing, and not transition is imminent? Or one that adopts the standard modalities of transitional justice but that resists the language? This paper takes note of these definitional debates, but instead of seeking to identify the most appropriate definition, and thereby boundaries, of transitional justice, it stays within these messy ‘borderlands’ (Anzaldúa 1987), and examines the particularities of justice initiatives shaping up in around these permeable borders of transitional justice to reflect on what can be learnt from them. In doing so, we seek to move beyond three common positions that characterize scholarship focused on these kinds of initiatives. A first is a legalistic or institutional reading of transitional justice that dismisses these kinds of innovative or experimental deployments of transitional justice as falling beyond the scope of the paradigm. A second is a position of radical critique of TJ that does not consider these initiatives to be manifestations of transitional justice because of a more fundamental rejection of the paradigm per se. A third is a more integrationist view, most commonly expressed in the form of proposals for transformative justice, which typically seek to acknowledge and map demands emerging in these spaces and initiatives, and to integrate them into a more transformative understanding of the reigning transitional justice paradigm. While valuable in their own right, this paper draws on illustrative empirical material from the DRC, a context of ongoing violence, where grassroots justice actors are engaging in a wide range of justice practices that do not easily fit the transitional justice paradigm, to explore a more conceptual question about how our understanding of transitional justice shifts if we recenter the conversation on the destabilisation, epistemic uncertainty, friction and unravelling that takes place at the borders. As such, the paper proposes ‘staying in the borderlands’ as an alternative for understanding these aparadigmatic mobilizations of transitional justice.