Justice in Transition?

The field of transitional justice is in transition. Across current scholarship and policy, there is a growing recognition of both the limitations of extant transitional justice paradigms and their failures in practice. There is also a growing emphasis upon new models of transformative transitional justice which aim to effect social change in and after conflict. A key challenge now is to build a new concept of transformative transitional justice that does not repeat the limits and failures of the dominant paradigms of the field. To begin this concept-building work, this chapter explores an alternative model of feminist transformative justice. Section 1 of the Chapter explores the concept of feminist transformative justice developed in the ‘Women's Court of the Former Yugoslavia’ (the ‘Women's Court’), a feminist non-governmental alternative justice mechanism held in Bosnia in 2015. This approach builds on critical currents within the transitional justice field, which first emerged in the 1990s with feminist and post-colonial critiques of liberal models of transitional justice imposed by the ‘international community.’ Section 2 of the chapter then discusses the ideas of ‘transformative transitional justice’ emerging in international policy and practice. It examines how this paradigm claims to adopt a ‘novel’ emphasis on social transformation, but still remains within a liberal technocratic frame. The feminist approach to justice of the Women's Court shows the need to build new concepts of ‘transformation,’ ‘justice,’ and ‘transitional justice’ itself.