Justice on the Move: Space, Place and Contexts for Transitional Justice and Humans Rights

Justice which responds to large scale violations of human rights is always on the move. It moves across time as it grapples with shifting values and principles as well as addressing harms of the past in the contexts of the present. It also moves across place as the ‘distanced’ international justice intervenes in situation countries, or applies supposedly ‘western’ norms in the Global South. It is also a dynamic justice, continually contested, re-shaped and emerging as a set of practices and norms. To capture and analyse this movement, in its broadest sense, contextualising thinking, policy and practice is paramount. This emphasis on context can take different approaches: historical contexts and the (post)colonial encounter; geopolitical contexts which inform support for intervention and multilateral decision-making; cultural contexts which give meaning to key concepts such as ‘justice’, ‘peace’ or ‘rights’. Context can also apply to space and place, the implications of which are only recently being fully explored. For ECPR 2020 we seek to build on a series of successful sections sponsored by the Human Rights and Transitional Justice Standing Group which have most recently explored questions of interdisciplinarity, research-policy-practice exchange, and the boundaries of the fields of transitional justice and human rights. In these discussions the theme of justice on the move has been raised and we see potential to explore and focus on greater detail on this topic. We therefore invite contributions addressing themes that may include but are certainly not limited to: - Movement of peoples and the intersection with transitional justice and human rights, including diasporas, refugees, internally displaced people or migration in general - Changing contexts of multilateral action related to transitional justice and human rights - Contexts and politics of intervention - How space, place and context shape and are shaped by transitional justice and human rights. - The possibilities of a transitional justice ‘lens’ on contemporary issues, how past experiences of transitional justice mechanisms could inform current challenges, such as violent extremism. - Whether we are in a period of crisis for human rights Finally, the Section Chair and Co-Chairs wish to encourage early career as well as established scholars and practitioners to participate in ECPR General Conferences and Workshops. This section aims to place scholars and practitioners at different stages of their career in conversation with each other, in order to encourage, inspire and challenge a new generation of political scientists.