Why do some Transitional Justice (TJ) mechanisms become durable institutional anchors for state or local memory-making, while others turn into sites of political weaponisation, elite manipulation, and state-civil society contestation? This workshop asks what explains this divergence with a focus on the institutional, societal, and cultural relationship between TJ and the politics of memory. It aims to bring together researchers from various conceptual, theoretical, and empirical approaches to identify the explanatory factors and processes that connect the two and to compare how this relationship unfolds across societies confronting a difficult past.
The relationship between TJ and memory is increasingly becoming relevant. The UN's recognition of memorialisation as the fifth pillar of TJ reflects the mutually constitutive nature of the two phenomena, and the weaponisation and manipulation of memory continue to happen in new democracies even after the implementation of TJ mechanisms. There has been an increasing body of literature connecting TJ and memory, yet much of it remains typological, interpretative, and contingent on actor or state specificity. This workshop attempts to fill this gap by exploring the potential of understanding the systematic dynamics between TJ and the politics of memory.
Since memory-making in transitional societies is inherently political, there is a necessity to shed light on who has ownership of narrating memory (political opportunity structure), why abuse of memory occurs (elite strategic behaviour), and under what socio-legal and political conditions institutionally implemented TJ mechanisms generate divergent, open-ended trajectories of memory-making, to enable more systematic analyses that reveal a common logic. This is not necessarily to establish causality between the two mutually constitutive phenomena, but to trace the political processes through which they shape one another. By doing this, the workshop can contribute to developing useful analytical frameworks for broader comparative research.
Pursuing this comparative agenda, while being aware of the recent a-paradigmatic expansion of the TJ field and the diverse forms of implementation of TJ by different actors, this workshop focuses on institutional, paradigmatic TJ mechanisms and their connection to official and societal memory-making processes to enable cross-case comparability.
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1: How does the design of TJ mechanisms shape the political opportunity structure for memory-making?
2: Under what conditions does TJ implementation empower certain actors as authoritative narrators of the past?
3: How does TJ shape political elites' risk perception when dealing with a violent past?
4: Why do some states converge on a dominant narrative, while others remain sites of persistent memory conflict?
5: How is memory politically mobilised to justify or prevent TJ implementation?
1: Comparative analysis of TJ mechanisms and their long-term political impact on official memory-making
2: Memorialisation as the 'fifth pillar' of TJ: conceptual and empirical debates
3: Victim groups, civil society, and journalists as producers of alternative or vernacular memory narratives
4: Political elites' risk calculation in strategic uses of narratives of the past to (de)legitimise the legacy of TJ
5: Memory legislation, denialism, and historical revisionism as political responses to TJ
6: The institutional legacy of truth commissions: archives, commemorative infrastructure, and their political uses
