This chapter elaborates the importance of local value added, knowledge, and ownership in latecomers’ catching up. The auto sector in Thailand, IT sector in Penang and mining sector in Chile show that reliance on foreign ownership is a recipe for limited domestic value added and innovation. Foreign MNCs source knowledge from R&D centers in headquarters and thus do not feel a need to cultivate R&D centers abroad. The eventual rise of local sources of knowledge and firms was possible owing to the involvement of the state in the various forms of industrial and innovation policies. In the most extreme cases, such as the palm oil sector in Malaysia, local ownership was obtained by hostile takeovers of foreign firms. In some cases, there were asymmetric regulations and promotion of indigenous firms over foreign firms, such as the auto sector in China. Promotion of locally owned firms and sectors goes together with discipline from global market competition, as seen from the failure of national cars in Malaysia. In sum, a common success formula is “learning from foreign sources at the initial stage, leading to the rise of local value added, knowledge, and ownership, owing to industrial policies under market discipline.”

This chapter provides the core argument and engages with concepts and theories relevant to the book. It begins with a comprehensive literature review of the turn to the local within transitional justice. While local transitional justice mechanisms are supposed to better align with the needs and priorities of affected populations, often these programs are measured against their own goals, or normative expectations of transitional justice, which overlooks how individuals and communities navigate these programs in multiple and diverse ways. This book examines different types of agency of Sierra Leoneans in what I refer to as recognised and unrecognised local transitional justice processes. Using Fambul Tok as an example of a recognised local transitional justice program, the book explores how various types of agency are involved in constructing and shaping local TJ programs, often resulting in a range of unintended consequences. This book builds upon scholarship in a range of disciplines including peace and conflict studies, anthropology, development, politics and social and legal studies. Ultimately, the book argues that justice does not happen to or for people, but that is an act in and of itself. It illustrates how local programs and processes actually work in practice.

This chapter begins exploring Fambul Tok’s program. It looks at how the organization illustrates the different ways they project themselves as local and what this says about the reproduction of common local tropes by people who know and understand this vernacular, namely by highlighting national identity – Sierra Leonean – and cultural and traditional practices by examining the materials they produced. This is contrasted with ethnographic observations, which explored how the organization actually operated on a daily basis, looking in particular at the interactions and hierarchies both within the organization, between staff and program participants. Exploring these interactions demonstrates how local transitional justice organizations also create and reinforce internal societal hierarchies, mirroring international-local hierarchies. Thus, knowledge of transitional justice and how the local is constructed within TJ programs is its own form of power. Exploring how the agency is employed by different people in different contexts enriches how we understand the micro-dynamics of power, knowledge and discourse within post-conflict contexts.

This chapter sets out to unpack a number of assumptions and principles on which the mainstream transitional justice approach (normal model) is based. It gives particular attention to Pablo de Greiff’s ‘normative conception of transitional justice’, which provides an important backdrop against which my pluralist reading unfolds in the subsequent chapters. Moreover, this chapter places the book’s argument in relation to larger ongoing critical debates within the field.

In the aftermath of the more than twenty-year armed conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government, northern Uganda has become a transitional justice laboratory. In response to widespread human rights violations perpetrated by both the rebels and government soldiers, various peacebuilding and transitional justice mechanisms have been put into place. However, many of them are top-down and externally-driven, inaccessible to rural communities and/or irresponsive to diverse experiences and post-conflict needs. In this vacuum of post-conflict assistance, different alternative avenues have emerged at the micro level that ultimately enable war-affected communities to engage with their subjective experiences on their own terms. This chapter specifically focuses on the role of survivors’ support groups. It shows how different types of survivors’ groups, in a creative and participatory manner, enable survivors’ agency and craft spaces for healing, justice making and peace-building, shaped by survivors’ own experiences and needs. Support groups thereby aid survivors in developing adaptive capacities to positively respond to shocks and stressors resulting from mass violence. In this way, these groups also contribute to fostering individual and community resilience.

The conclusion examines my argument’s implications for both scholarship and policy. For scholars, the evidence I offer here challenges the strict geographic and chronological separation between time periods and peacekeeping missions that some studies take as given. For policymakers, the arguments and evidence I advance contribute to ongoing debates about the future of peace operations.Peacekeeping today is turning increasingly towards a more military posture—but key among my argument’s implications is the idea that if the reconstruction, investment, and refugee resettlement services the international community can provide are more important than security protection to some combatants, then tying negotiation, peacekeeping, and intervention more tightly to the UN’s aid and humanitarian agencies may represent another, better direction for the UN.

Chapter 8 scrutinizes why actors should embed themselves in the arena in the first place and when they prefer detaching from everyday security. The question of embedding or detaching is particularly relevant to newly arriving peacekeepers but also poses itself to national militaries. Embedding into the arena forces an actor to engage in fluid ordering as everyday contact and spontaneous security events necessitate immediate reactions. Detachment, on the other hand, allows for more organized and directed engagement of the security arena through stable ordering. However, detachment can fuel rumours and allegations thereby deteriorating the overall security situation. Actors become torn between fulfilling local demands for robust intervention by accepting fluidity, on the one hand, and meeting international demands of stable ordering through detachment, on the other.