Transitional Justice And Displacement PDF Download

Forced displacement of people is one of the most complex humanitarian problems facing the international community. Long-term forced displacement generates a range of political, security and humanitarian concerns including regional instability, transnational crime and a regression in the quality of life for both refugees and their host communities. Grappling with this issue, scholars and practitioners have turned to the field of transitional justice as a possible source of solutions. Transitional justice refers to the set of mechanisms societies use to respond to a history of atrocities, including criminal trials, truth commissions and reparation programs. Scholars describe the potential for these mechanisms to respond to the justice needs of refugees, thereby improving prospects for their repatriation, and contributing to the success of their reintegration after return. To date, the interaction between transitional justice and refugees has had three main features. The first is an almost exclusive use of a legal framework of human rights to structure the interaction between refugees and transitional justice. This means that the law determines the understanding of the harm refugees suffer, as well as the methods by which that harm might be repaired. Second, the existing approach focuses on state-led mechanisms of transitional justice, with limited engagement with local or customary approaches to achieving justice for refugees, and little acknowledgment of refugee voices. And finally, scholars and practitioners describe the ultimate goal of the interaction between transitional justice and refugees as refugee return. There is little empirical work examining the standard approach to the interaction between transitional justice and refugees. My thesis addresses this gap, offering two case studies: Liberia and Afghanistan. Through these case studies, I scrutinise the claims of the existing scholarship, and compare those claims with the lived experience of refugees. Overall, my findings suggest that transitional justice as conventionally understood is often ill-equipped to support the justice outcomes that refugees seek. In particular, I demonstrate how the dominance of law and the influence of the transitional state restricted the ways that Liberian and Afghan refugees were able to engage with transitional justice processes. Based on refugee perspectives of harm, accountability and reparations, I propose an alternate understanding of the objective of refugee engagement in transitional justice: that of rebuilding the state-citizen relationship. This understanding more closely aligns with the justice outcomes refugees in Liberia and Afghanistan hoped to achieve, and suggests that repair of displacement may take place in the absence of physical return, and in forums other than those of legal, institutionalised transitional justice.