Justice Visions Human Rights Centre - UGent

Between 1956 and 2011, Tunisia endured decades of authoritarian rule under Presidents Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian Revolution in 2011 led to the ousting of Ben Ali and catalysed the start of the institutional transitional justice process. Yet, mobilisation against authoritarian rule and the curtailment of basic freedoms also predated the establishment of this formal process.


In this episode, our guests Houcine Bouchiba, Hamza Ben Nasr and Leila Bejaoui discuss how the participation and activism of victims, supported by victims’ organisations and civil society, profoundly shaped the transitional justice process in Tunisia. Survivors and activists have played a pivotal role in pushing for accountability, supporting truth-seeking, and advocating for reform – despite facing numerous obstacles and waning public and political will.

Houcine, Hamza and Leila speak to the realizations and setbacks of the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVD) and the Specialized Criminal Chambers, whilst illustrating the importance of foregrounding gendered harms and socio-economic demands (for employment, and livelihoods) in the Tunisian context.

At the same time, the events of July 2021 have caused widespread concern about the country’s transitional justice trajectory. This also prompted our guests to reflect on how the current reality affects victims’ experiences and trajectories, and how it pushes victims’ organisations and civil society to reorganize in order to revitalize justice efforts and resist autocratization.

This episode was realized in collaboration with Avocats Sans Frontières (Lawyers Without Borders), Tunis branch.

The new season of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on issues surrounding victim participation, mobilization and resistance. It focuses on debates that will also be addressed during the upcoming Justice Visions conference, taking place 13-15 March 2024, in Ghent (Belgium) and online. In this episode, we talk about the methodological challenges of doing research on victims’ lived experiences of participation in and resistance against formal transitional justice processes.

Our studio guest is professor Sanne Weber. Her research focuses on gender-just reparations in rural communities in Colombia’s Caribbean region, where survivors were engaged in the process of land restitution and collective reparations. In the episode we focus on participation in formal avenues, because, as Sanne argues, thee continue to be of paramount importance for victims: “What is really important about the more formal processes is the recognition by the state, because eventually it’s the state’s responsibility to redress the harm and transform the situation. Even though informal or non-formal spaces are very important and can have very important goal of rebuilding social fabric and recreating trust.”

Yet, while her initial plan was to employ participatory research methods, she soon found that her potential research participants had limited interest in this approach, due to a “participation fatigue” which can be traced back to how the formal transitional justice process was organized. Colombia’ Victim law is often hailed for promoting innovative forms of victim participation, yet significant challenges have characterized its implementation. As Sanne argues, “Participation in this process had required a great investment of time and effort, but they weren’t seeing the results of their participation.”

This raises important questions for researchers in terms of how to navigate this scepticism regarding participatory methods, the power dynamics surrounding it, and the concrete strategies for foregrounding the voices of people who experienced violence. As Sanne underscores in the podcast, this is a trial and error process: “It is really a way of trying to overcome obstacles by sharing the power between participants and researchers. This has a long history in Latin America - this approach of combining research with activism and valuing grassroots knowledge.”

This episode on research methods lays the foundation for a next episode which focuses on the actual experience of survivors who participated in formal processes.

The new episode of Justice Visions takes a distinct approach. In response to the escalating violence in Palestine and Israel following the Hamas attacks on October 7th and Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip, we felt compelled to address these critical issues of justice and accountability. Our focus today are these international crimes occurring in an environment where impunity prevails.

The new season of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the issue of victim participation, mobilization and resistance. This dedicated focus aligns with the overarching theme of the Justice Visions conference, taking place in March 2024. Our first episode centers on institutional innovation and its symbiotic relationship with victim participation. This is a dynamic interplay where, on one hand, formal transitional justice mechanisms shape various transitional justice processes with significant implications for victims. On the other, formal mechanisms increasingly engage with victim participation, which is seen as an essential requirement for achieving the goals of transitional justice.



We talk about this interplay between formal and informal avenues and the topic of institutional change with Dr. Brianne McGonigle Leyh, who is affiliated with the Netherlands Institute of Human and Utrecht’s University’s School of Law. Brianne has been working extensively on international criminal law, transitional justice and victims’ rights. Recently, her work zooms in on aparadigmatic cases, examining transitional justice initiatives in the United States. In Brianne’s words, “there are new ways of using the language of transitional justice, using the language of human rights to advance a cause that meets the needs and concerns of community actors and community members. So, when we see even traditional processes being used to advance justice for historical harms, I think that’s brilliant.”



Reflecting on her extensive research journey, Brianne talks about the evolution of participatory rights across the pillars of transitional justice. She emphasizes: “I definitely think we’ve seen major changes in the past 20, 15, even 10 and 5 years. Participation has become so integral, not just in transitional justice. Actually, even in the broader field of human rights law, participation has become absolutely integral. There’s an expression, I believe it was first used in disability rights: “Nothing about us without us”. And we’ve seen that phrase really spread to so many different groups and communities that have long fought for these participatory rights.” This “participatory turn” has left an indelible mark on institutional structures and processes established during times of transition.

In this special episode of the Justice Visions podcast we go back to the core of the Justice Visions research project and explore important evolutions in how we think about the complex notions of victimhood and victim participation within the field of transitional justice.

Together with Cheryl Lawther and Tine Destrooper, we talk how the recent expansion of transitional justice, the diverse range of contexts in which it is implemented, and the growing attention to diverse knowledge approaches, shaped our understanding of these complex concepts in different contexts.

The notion of victimhood itself is central to Cheryl’s forthcoming book ‘Beyond Innocence and Guilt: Constructing Victimhood in Transitional Justice’. In this episode, she argues that when we’re thinking about victimhood in transitional justice we need to engage with a much bigger range of thematic issues:

This position also has implication for how we think about victim participation in formal and informal spaces of transitional justice, which is the focus of Tine Destrooper’s work. As she explains in this episode, victim participation in transitional justice can be both a locus and a driver of transformative change, if it is developed in ways that are meaningful for those who experienced harm:

How to organize participation in a meaningful way, however, requires a better understanding of how people who experienced violence navigate and negotiate or reshape or reject participation in transitional justice, how formal spaces shape informal spaces and vice versa, etc. As Tine argues in the podcast, ‘There are a lot of relational dynamics related to participation that we need to understand better’.

These questions will also be discussed in more detail during the international ERC conference Victims and Transitional Justice: Participation. Mobilisation. Resistance, organised by Justice Visions in Ghent in March 2024.

How is victimhood constructed in relation to, for example, what voices do we hear, and what voices do we not hear? What happens when we perhaps freeze victims and survivors in one particular narrative and treat that one experience in their life as their total identity, their total voice? (…) and what about what about the forms of victimhood that we don’t see, or we don’t hear?Meaningful participation foregrounds lived experiences and can be a way to facilitate reflexive understandings of rights that underpin various agendas for justice or redress.

The final episode of the Justice Visions miniseries on the revolutionary potential of transitional justice zooms in on the relationship between protest, artistic practices and transitional justice in South Sudan. This might seem not be the most obvious choice for such a miniseries, as transitional justice is a relatively new concept in the world’s youngest nation, which has endured decades of violence.

South Sudan gained independence in 2011, following more than 20 years of civil war, and subsequently experienced another civil war from 2013 to 2020. In response to the legacies of these conflicts, both formal and informal transitional justice initiatives have been established. While the peace agreements put forward four transitional justice measures, none of these foreseen measures became operational. In the absence of functioning formal transitional justice mechanisms, the artistic realm has emerged as an incubator for contestation and resistance.

We are exploring the way in which artistic practices further both TJ and protest with Sayra van den Berg. Sayra has recently conducted fieldwork in South Sudan, focusing on contemporary artistic and cultural expressions, notably in the domain of visual arts and music. She describes how several artists share goals with the transitional justice advocacy community, even if they do not self-identify as TJ actors, arguing that,

While I don't necessarily think that there is an intrinsic benefit in adopting the language of transitional justice for these artistic spaces, I do think that there's a very real relational benefit to being a part of this wider transitional justice community that using that language grants access to.

Delving into the vibrant artistic landscape, she describes arts’ potential for innovation in TJ spaces and discussions. Scholars and practitioners can act upon this:

The increasingly critical turn in scholarship around formal mechanisms of transitional justice is a call to action for all of us in this incredibly fluid and evolving field of research, to locate the practice of transitional justice in the spaces where its goals are centralized and not merely within a rather static and narrow set of formal mechanisms.