Liberal Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice: What Place for Socioeconomic Concerns?
Recent scholarship in transitional justice has increasingly acknowledged that both the practice and study of justice in transition have focused almost exclusively upon violations of civil and political rights, and particularly of bodily integrity, to the
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Introduction As Dustin Sharp clearly articulates in the introduction to this volume, transitional justice measures have become part of the post-conflict “toolkit” in many countries, often as part of peacebuilding missions.1 Yet, while economic grievances are often identified as underlying causes of conflict alongside numerous other causes such as corrupt governance, state abuses, ethnic divisions, and scarce or plentiful lootable resources, the putative economic causes are often least addressed in peacebuilding or transitional justice processes. In this chapter, I will elaborate upon why this may be the case. I take a broad view of “socioeconomic concerns” deliberately, so as to be able to draw upon several interwoven literatures dealing with the violation and protection of economic, social, and cultural rights, the economic dimensions of violent conflict, economic justice and redistribution, and development. This is not to presume that all of the claims of these literatures are aligned, but rather to recognize the diversity of arguments about what socioeconomic
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Dustin Sharp, “Addressing Economic Violence in Times of Transition: Toward a Positive-Peace Paradigm for Transitional Justice” in this volume; see also Sharp, “Beyond the Post-Conflict Checklist: Linking Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice Through the Lens of Critique,” Chicago Journal of International Law 14 (2013): 165–196. I would like to thank Amy Ross for extensive discussions and comments on an earlier draft of this chapter and Dustin Sharp’s incisive comments and suggestions. Any errors are of course mine alone.
C. L. Sriram (*) School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
D. N. Sharp (ed.), Justice and Economic Violence in Transition, Springer Series in Transitional Justice 5, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-8172-0_2, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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issues are in the wake of conflict, and how if at all transitional justice processes should address them. I agree with other scholars that transitional justice processes seldom take account of socioeconomic issues, and argue that to the degree that transitional justice processes are embedded in liberal peacebuilding, they are unlikely to do so. In this chapter, I build on my earlier argument that transitional justice processes, as increasingly integral to and integrated into peacebuilding processes, suffer from some of the latter’s limitations.2 Following the liberal peacebuilding critique, which suggests that contemporary peacebuilding processes overemphasize democratization and economic liberalization, I elaborate how transitional justice measures partially do the same, to the exclusion of addressing economic harms. I do not argue that liberal peacebuilding causes or is the sole cause of this exclusion; transitional justice processes emphasize past abuses which take the form of physical and psychological harm t
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