Tine Destrooper

Transitional justice is the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation. The question of how these transitional justice processes can engender lasting social and economic justice in societies emerging from protracted periods of violent conflict has been on the agenda of scholars and practitioners since the first international interventions in post-conflict societies took place.

Increasingly acclaimed commentators are arguing that, if these interventions want to have a lasting impact, they should pay more attention to economic and social justice in general, and to economic and social rights (ESR) in particular. However, the question about how the systematic integration of ESR into transitional justice processes could contribute to a deeply rooted social justice in practice has remained largely unaddressed.

My research will simultaneously address these two concerns–What is the place of ESR in transitional justice? And how can transitional justice interventions aspire to have a long-term effect? –by turning to the role of civil society organizations (CSO).

The following questions will guide my research:

(i) How can transitional justice processes create momentum for subsequent civil society activism for social justice?
(ii) In those transitional justice mechanisms where there was systematic victim participation, how did this participation shape subsequent CSO activism for social justice?
(iii) Is activists' understanding of social justice shaped by the current bias of TJ interventions towards CPR? Put differently, could the promotion of a more comprehensive understanding of economic and social justice during the TJ process (i.e. one that includes both CPR and ESR concerns) inspire a more robust and encompassing kind of social activism?
(iv) What is the effect of these emerging understandings of social justice on the prospect for long-term locally-carried social justice and regional stability?

As such, the proposed research deals with the extent to which transitional justice's failure to engage with socio-economic forms of mass harm causation affects the extent to which social movements might do the same, and how this may eventually affect the potential for social justice. To answer these questions, I will examine the complex interaction between transitional justice, participatory approaches, and mobilization for societal justice in the case of the Extraordinary Chambers of the Court of Cambodia (ECCC).