Justice Visions

Human Rights Centre - UGent
  • 5.0 (2)
  • SOCIAL SCIENCES
Justice Visions

The Justice Visions podcast is hosted by the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University. The podcast showcases cutting-edge research and practice regarding victim participation in transitional justice.

  1. 12/04/2024

    Victim Participation as Labor

    In this new episode we zoom in on an oft-overlooked dimension of victim participation in formal transitional justice processes, namely the labor that victims invest in justice processes. In a conversation with professor Leila Ulrich, we explore the intricate relationship between the ICC’s engagement with victims and the global capitalist systems in which the court operates. The dynamics of under-valorization of victims time-investment, the offloading of care work to local and gendered practitioners, and the invisibilization of victims’ contributions to formal justice processes, characterize many international justice processes, Leila argues. Therefore, it is crucial to acknowledge and make this work politically visible as labor. Foregrounding the knowledge, resources, and time people dedicate allows us to acknowledge their contributions and better understand the depth of their involvement. "[T]here is a lot of tension between those who work and those who don't work in the same way that there's a lot of tension between those who are recognised as victims and those who are not. So there's a lot of complexities and paradoxes involved in how victim participation functions." In this new episode, Tine Destrooper is joined by co-host Kim Baudewijns, who recently became a member of the Justice Visions' team, doing research on TJ processes in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kim’s work situates this conversation in the broader landscape of justice initiatives: standardized and informal, local and international, judicial and non-judicial, etc. This inspires a reflection on how victims’ roles alter across these various justice sites.

    33 min

  2. 11/07/2024

    Victim Leadership and Mobilization in Turkey and Tunisia

    We kick off this new season of the Justice Visions podcast with a set of conversations that we initiated during the recent Justice Visions Conference, exploring victim participation, mobilization, and resistance within the realm of transitional justice. In this first episode of these miniseries, we shed light on victims driving transitional justice efforts in Turkey and Tunisia. Our guests, Dr. Sélima Kebaili and Dr. Güneş Daşlı, both focus in their research on women survivors in contexts of conflict. Sélima, a senior lecturer at the University of Geneva, touches on the marginalization of female survivors in the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission and how survivors sought to overcome this. Güneş, a research fellow at Loughborough University, speaks of the mobilization of members of the Saturday Mothers who seek justice for enforced disappearances and crimes committed by Turkish state forces and paramilitaries. Both scholars unpack the nuances of labels such as “leaders” and “victims”. Sélima explains that while “victim leadership” might make sense in terms of underlining the important role victims play in driving transitional justice efforts, we have to be mindful of the label when applying it in the context of movements, as it runs the risk of defining certain victims as leaders and pushing others into more passive identities. Many women assert their agency beyond the public realm, and a discourse of leadership may render their actions invisible. Güneş points to the ways in which in Turkey survivors and family members use the labels of victim and survivor flexibly and how they navigate multiple identities. Starting their justice activism as relatives of the disappeared, they often evolve into human rights defenders, political actors, or lawyers, embracing multiple roles that sustain their resistance and resilience. In both cases, acknowledging a diversity of experiences, identities and approaches is crucial, since rebuilding identities after extreme violence is a very delicate process. As Sélima notes, "It doesn’t always require a grand gesture, and often it unfolds through more modest everyday forms of reparation, like returning to work, reconnecting with others, and restoring a social life." In the absence of an official transitional justice process in Turkey, groups like the Saturday Mothers have for nearly 30 years led informal efforts for legal accountability, memory work, and truth recovery. Güneş emphasizes that victims maintain a long-term perspective and are not dissuaded by the apparent lack of hope: "We know that there is no hope now, but we continue. We are going to archive. We are going to focus on what we do now. But when the time comes, we are going to act."

    27 min

  3. 07/16/2024

    Re-imagining Memorialization and Documentation in Afghanistan

    The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this third episode of the miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization and documentation efforts in Afghanistan, and reflect on the merits of arts-based approaches, as well as the challenges posed by such approaches.Sophia Bijleveld Milosevic is a member of AHRDO, an Afghan human rights organization that uses a transformative, victim-oriented approach. Their work aims to document human rights violations for judicial purposes while also telling victims' stories in a way that reflects their lived experiences, among others via art-based approaches. Through the Memory Box initiative, AHRDO collected over 15.000 personal items of war victims, creating a space for individual and collective memorialization in Afghanistan. "We felt it was important to continue to share these testimonies and to continue to advocate for victims", states Sophia. "In the Afghan context, memorialization can be considered as a form of symbolic reparation and a way of acknowledging the stories of the victims." To leverage their expertise in documentation, and launch an online platform, AHRDO partnered with HURIDOCS.HURIDOCS is an organization specializing in archival and documentation practices in the domain of human Rights. Its documentalist, Bono Olgado talks about how the victim-centred and arts-based practices of AHRDO challenged his organization to revisit its existing archival practice, and how memory and memorialization are understood. "When we are talking about creating a platform or a database that would reflect these art-based approaches, then we would need a different form of expertise, which is quite challenging because we're technically creating counter-epistemologies to existing practises of documentation." Initiatives such as the Memory Box and art-based methodologies, Bono stresses, reconfigure our understanding of documentation and data. "The challenge is to design technologies that actually support this new set of methodologies as opposed to flattening them."

    29 min

  4. 06/28/2024

    Stitching Memories: Embroidery in Shatila

    The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this second episode of these miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization efforts through embroidery practices in Shatila camp in Beirut. Since the increasing repression by the Assad regime and the war in Syria, there has been a large influx of refugees into Shatila, originally a Palestinian refugee camp. Our colleague Sofie Verclyte recently defended her PhD project ‘Migrating heritage’, and developed a co-creative project with women in Shatila. In that project, she explored the role of embroidery practices in the context of conflict and displacement. Tine De Strooper and Brigitte Herremans spoke to Sofie about the practice of embroidery, and how it has been used in the Syrian context, as a way to remember, and an important element in the broader struggle for justice. While embroidery might not seem directly reconcilable with a struggle for justice, it has a long history of narrating lived experiences. There are many instances where practitioners use their skill to remember and transmit lived experiences of harm. As Sofie highlights: “this is also the case in Shatila, where embroidery, rooted in the region’s rich textile tradition, plays a central role in the lives of makers, typically women.” Traditionally, these women often passed down their craft through intergenerational mentorship, often as a form of storytelling. As such, embroidery is a way to transmit knowledge, to express lived experiences, and therefore also a way to preserve memories and to prevent forgetting. As Boushra, one of the artists with whom Sofie worked states: “For me, embroidery is a revival of memory. It prevents me from forgetting the experiences I went through, such as war, displacement and being a refugee. Often experiences are harsh, whether due to war, displacement, or life circumstances.” Boushra emphasizes that she sees embroidery as a form of communication, a language for sharing experiences. This perspective highlights the significance of nonverbal practices in capturing and conveying experiences of harm. In a context where formal memorialization initiatives are absent because of the ongoing injustices and the context of the entrenched non-transition, informal memorialization efforts can be seen as a way to express, share, and resist memories of injustice. These private practices preserve unarchived and previously unrecorded memories, but also, and often simultaneously, they make it possible to imagine a more just future.

    26 min

  5. 06/14/2024

    Memorialization from below in Guatemala and El Salvador

    The latest miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memorialization as the fifth pillar of transitional justice. The miniseries foreground innovative grassroots memorialization efforts from a wide array of contexts dealing with impunity, revisionism and lack of political will. This episode focuses on the vibrant memorialization landscape in Guatemala and El Salvador where victims-survivors and civil society organizations are actively constructing memory and dignifying the victims after mass atrocity. In this episode, Prof. Tine Destrooper brings into conversation Gretel Mejía Bonifazi and Prof. Amanda Grzyb, about working together with victims-survivors to undertake memorialization efforts in Guatemala and El Salvador respectively. Amanda discusses the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador project, which involves a participative methodology that involves documentation, research and commemoration initiatives that “reject an extractive model of research and focus instead on public facing projects… and that aim to recognize how community-based research and co-creation can count as research”. In the same vein, Gretel talks about the new research project that focuses on memorialization from below in the Ixil region. Gretel and Prof. Destrooper will work with Ixil survivors and grassroots actors who are currently mobilizing to create a Museum of Memory. The museum aims to both commemorate the victims of the genocide and to recover the cultural heritage of the Maya Ixil. In line with a participative and collaborative approach, the project looks at working with “victims-survivors according to their needs and worldviews, and to contribute to their ongoing memorialization efforts”. According to local actors and partners, engaging in bottom-up memory collaborations holds great importance. For Felipe Tobar, a Salvadoran survivor and local founder of the Surviving Memory project, the significance of the project lies in “facilitating and strengthening the organization of all the survivors and relatives” who are now more involved in the different initiatives. It has allowed the communities to have access to “health programs and psychosocial attention for the first time, which has helped them to heal the wounds” and work for the non-repetition of human rights violations. Guests:  Prof. Amanda F. Grzyb, is Professor of Information and Media Studies at Western University, where her primary teaching and research interests include state violence, genocide studies, social movements, and memory studies. Her edited books, articles, book chapters, public reports, and research-creation projects focus on Central America, Nazi-occupied Europe, Rwanda, and Sudan. Dr. Grzyb currently serves as the project director for Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador (a SSHRC and CFI-funded community-based research partnership committed to documenting the history of the Salvadoran Civil War and preventing future violence. Felipe Tobar is a survivor of the Sumpul Massacre and the El Alto Massacre. During the war, 18 members of his family were murdered. Throughout the war, he was displaced with his family, fleeing in the mountains and suffering the inclement weather, hunger, diseases and the persecution of the repressive forces of the government until the signing of the Peace Agreements in 1992. Don Felipe is the President of the Board of Directors of Asociación Sumpul,.an organization of massacre survivors in Chalatenango, and former mayor of San José Las Flores, Chalatenango, El Salvador. Felipe is one of the founders of the Surviving Memory project and a key collaborator on many sub-projects, such as the memorial at Las Aradas, the massacres map, workshops, testimonies, amongst other projects.

    34 min

  6. 03/12/2024

    Driving Justice: Victims' Participation and Mobilisation in Tunisia's Struggles for Redress

    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.

    24 min

  7. 01/17/2024

    Researching Survivors' Participation in Colombia

    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.

    22 min

  8. 11/29/2023

    Failing Accountability in Palestine and Israel

    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.

    35 min
See All (47)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

The Justice Visions podcast is hosted by the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University. The podcast showcases cutting-edge research and practice regarding victim participation in transitional justice.

Information

  • Creator
    Human Rights Centre - UGent
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2024
  • Episodes
    47
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Human Rights Centre - UGent
  • Show Website
    Justice Visions

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes, and get the latest updates.
Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada