Summerschool course ‘From transitional to transformative justice’
This course in the Utrecht Summer School will help you understand how societies deal with past violence and injustice. Transitional justice and human rights are ‘booming’ fields in research and practice. At the same time, they face huge global challenges. Conventional institutions that protect them are under threat.
This course combines recent critical literature, insights from our own research, and non-conventional case studies with an excursion to The Hague. We will identify new actors and instruments that help us re-imagine these fields – a task that seems more urgent than ever.
The course will teach participants to operationalize concepts and tools of Transitional Justice and human rights for both research and practice, familiarize them with challenges of the fields, and provide them with a critical understanding of justice questions at a local, national, and global level.
For whom is the course Transitional Justice?
- Master students and postgraduate/PhD-students studying the fields of transitional justice and/or human rights, or related fields like war studies, ecocide, genocide, institutional injustice, social justice.
- Bachelor students with specialized profiles are also warmly welcomed.
- Professionals and practitioners working in the fields of transitional justice and/or human rights who would like to deepen their knowledge.
Transitional Justice
Transitional justice has been called a ‘defining global movement of our time.’ As both academics and practitioners engage with the field, it addresses the long-term effects of human rights violations and provides instruments to deal with them through judicial and non-judicial approaches: criminal trials and tribunals, apologies, historical commissions, commemorations and institutional reforms.
Dealing with past wrongdoings has also developed into a conversation about ongoing injustices, which often means to link local, national, and transnational concerns. Over the past few decades, the field has quickly grown. It has generated both praise and critique. While the first generation of transitional justice focused on the transition of states (from an era of injustice, violence and oppression towards peace and democracy), the new generation includes different actors and instruments, emphasizing restorative, retributive, reparative or redistributive justice, aiming for systemic and institutional change.
That is why in this course, we will present the idea of transformative justice (Gready and Robins 2014): a new agenda for transitional justice practice that centers agency and participation of victimized people. In this course, through interactive engagement with participants, we will together explore the potential of transformative justice. We combine this bottom-up approach, focusing on lived realities of victimized people, with an understanding of institutional logics of injustice.