Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding on the Ground: Victims and Ex-Combatants (Law, Conflict and International Relations) (2 page)

Lars Waldorf
is Senior Lecturer in International Human Rights Law at the Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York, UK. He has co-edited three books:
Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2011);
Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence
(Stanford University Press, CA, 2010) and
Disarming the Past: Transitional Justice and Ex-Combatants
(SSRC, 2009).

Acknowledgements

This book emerges from a project funded by the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), entitled “Transitional justice as peacebuilding?” (Grant 002–9F), a joint project involving the four co-editors Chandra Lekha Sriram (principal investigator), Jemima García-Godos (co-investigator), Johanna Herman and Olga Martin-Ortega (researchers). We were interested in exploring the potential role and limitations of transitional justice as an element of peacebuilding, and the present volume is the result of this joint intellectual effort.

The concept idea for the project was developed at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo in Norway, and the Centre on Human Rights in Conflict at the University of East London, United Kingdom. We thank both institutions for their support during the initial phases. Jemima García-Godos’s research on Colombia, which is the basis of her chapter in this volume, was made possible with support from a post-doctoral research grant from the Research Council of Norway. Chandra Lekha Sriram’s research in Lebanon, Olga Martin-Ortega’s research in Bosnia, and Johanna Herman’s research in Cambodia, which formed the foundation of their chapters in this volume, were supported as part of a larger EU Framework VII Grant, “A just and durable peace by piece,” led by the University of Lund, Norway (no. 217488) (<
www.justpeace.se
>). Johanna Herman’s research was also supported by the University of East London Promising Researcher grant. Olga Martin-Ortega also acknowledges the support of the British Academy Grant (SG100735), “The role of hybrid courts in the institutional and substantive development of international criminal justice,” in the writing of her chapter. We would like to thank USIP for the research grant that allowed new field research to be undertaken in three sites (Colombia, Sierra Leone, and Liberia) and the organization of an authors’ meeting in May 2011. We are grateful to our referees, Professors Michael Doyle and Simon Chesterman, for their support, and to the anonymous referees at USIP.

David Backer, our Program Officer at USIP, provided valuable feedback to our project. At the authors’ meeting, we benefited greatly from thoughtful comments provided by Janet Adama Mohammed and Elizabeth Drew of Conciliation Resources. Stephen Brown offered exceptional editorial advice on the “Introduction.” Several of the papers also benefited from useful comments at the International
Studies Association annual conference in New Orleans in 2010 and the European Consortium for Political Research annual conference in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2011. We also offer our sincere thanks to all of our interviewees and those who supported our individual field research.

Finally, we would like to offer our sincere gratitude to our editor Andrew Humphrys for his continuing support.

Abbreviations

  1
Introduction

Jemima García-Godos and Chandra Lekha Sriram

Introduction and Rationale

Traditionally, peacebuilding and transitional justice literatures and practice either have not engaged one another or have been in tension, or even opposition. This is in part because long-standing “peace versus justice” debates posit that transitional justice and peacebuilding are necessarily in tension: that states emerging from violent conflict would have to choose to pursue peace
or
justice, but not both. This putative dilemma has never been, in fact, the reality, and a notable number of peace processes and subsequent peacebuilding activities have included measures of transitional justice, if not always criminal accountability. Thus we ask: Can transitional justice be not a challenge to, but an instrument of, peacebuilding? A range of contemporary post-conflict processes suggest different ways in which transitional justice mechanisms may contribute as an impetus for peacemaking and as a facilitator of peace implementation.

In this book, we seek to distill the findings of a range of studies designed for this purpose, examining the interaction between two specific aspects of transitional justice and peacebuilding: the promotion of victim-centered approaches to justice and short-term disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatant processes, and longer-term security challenges and social return and reintegration of ex-combatants. We focus on these specific aspects here, as they are often in tension with one another and increasingly involve programming that deals with overlapping activities and actors, without significant reflection or planning. The individual chapters address a number of recurring themes, including development and post-conflict priorities, decisions on timing and sequencing, and choices about whether to integrate DDR processes (or at least reintegration) more tightly with justice processes. The conclusion explores the findings of the volume in more detail and seeks to tease out policy implications. The aim of this introductory chapter is thus to set up the conceptual framework guiding our academic inquiry. We hope not only to contribute to the academic scholarship on transitional justice and peacebuilding, but also to inform practitioners seeking to refine their own work in this area.

Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding: Ongoing Debates

Much ink has been spilled on the purposes and content of both transitional justice and peacebuilding, and both concepts continue to evolve. Here, we do not take a stand on narrow vs broad conceptions of each, on critiques of practices such as “liberal peacebuilding,” or on calls for greater emphasis on development in transitional justice. Nor do we engage in far wider debates in the related and extraordinarily diverse field of peace and conflict studies. Rather, we briefly outline what the theory and practice of transitional justice and peacebuilding generally entail, and how they interact.

Transitional Justice

Transitional justice is a broad set of practices that emerged from efforts by countries in transition from authoritarianism and conflict to address past abuse. Today, these practices are carried out by a mixture of local actors, national governments, the UN and other international organizations, bilateral donors, and national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
¹
According to a 2004 UN report on transitional justice and rule of law, it:

We focus on a specific subset of mechanisms which are often expected to address the needs and demands of victims, specifically prosecutions, reparations, commissions of inquiry, and traditional justice processes.

As we shall see, in many countries more than one mechanism is deployed, although often not in a coordinated way.
³
Increasingly, transitional justice processes are initiated alongside peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations, working in parallel to, and sometimes in tension with, a range of peacebuilding activities, including disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of ex-combatants.
⁴
However, although they often operate simultaneously, transitional justice practices have a complex and contested relationship to peacemaking and peacebuilding.

Peacebuilding

Peacebuilding activities may be defined in a range of ways.
⁵
For the purposes of this volume, we rely on the approach of the UN system to peacebuilding, first defined in 1994 in
An Agenda for Peace
as the provision of assistance for institutional
reforms in support of democratization, to reform security forces and rebuild and reform state institutions. These build on, and often emerge from, peacekeeping operations, which received increasingly wide mandates from the UN Security Council during the 1990s, to address not just immediate security needs but also the original causes of conflict and build a durable peace.
⁶
These expanded peacekeeping missions begat peacebuilding as a multidimensional, longer-term political endeavor. Yet the record of peacebuilding activities to date has been mixed.
⁷
As part of a series of efforts to improve peacebuilding activities, in 2005 the UN General Assembly established the Peacebuilding Commission.
⁸
Sierra Leone, one of the countries examined in this volume, was one of the first countries to host an integrated peacebuilding mission supported by the commission. While peacebuilding activities have expanded, and increasingly overlapped with transitional justice activities, scholars and practitioners have continued to debate the appropriate relationship between each, in particular questioning whether accountability and transitional justice processes might interfere with peacemaking and peacebuilding.

Does Transitional Justice Impede Peace?

Although transitional justice measures often operate on the same territory, they are not necessarily complementary to peacebuilding missions, and much of the early literature on peace and justice suggested that the former would impede the latter.
⁹
Transitional justice can in fact interact in positive or negative ways with efforts to create and sustain peace in the wake of violent conflict or repression.

Advocates of transitional justice generally, and particularly of criminal accountability, claim that it promotes peace and may deter future abuses.
¹⁰
Some also claim that dealing with the past is essential to longer-term peacebuilding and to stop cycles of violence and prevent revenge and retaliation.
¹¹
A few further state that the failure to pursue accountability will undermine the rule of law and the legitimacy of the post-transition government.
¹²
Finally, many advocates of accountability argue—and this is critical for the current inquiry—that it is needed to address the demands and needs of victims.
¹³

On the other hand, peacebuilders are often concerned that transitional justice processes might disrupt fragile peace agreements. They are particularly concerned that parties to peace agreements, former combatants who are frequently responsible for abuses, might abandon peace processes and become spoilers, should they become targets of transitional justice.
¹⁴
For this reason, many peace agreements have included amnesties, though developing international norms reject blanket amnesties for serious international crimes, and United Nations mediators are not permitted to support their inclusion in peace deals.
¹⁵
Still, power-sharing deals often insulate parties to conflict from accountability without the use of amnesties.
¹⁶
Further, DDR processes often include former combatants in new or reformed security forces, in tension with demands for accountability or vetting and exclusion from roles in government of those who have abused human rights.
¹⁷