Colombia has faced over fifty years of internal armed conflict, resulting in more than 9 million victims and dozens of peace negotiations with different illegal armed groups. With the demobilization of the largest paramilitary group in 2003 (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia), the country saw renewed accountability efforts that highlighted the role of businesspeople in the violence. A norm of business accountability for past atrocities started to emerge with a number of convictions in the courts. When the government launched negotiations with the FARC guerrilla group in 2012, many observers expected continuity in this path of increased accountability of economic actors. But the path was severed. This chapter describes the ebbs and flows of business accountability in Colombia, looking at the role of the human rights movement in securing higher levels of accountability, and the emergence of an organized opposition from the business community to stop the process. The chapter argues that this business countermovement is a result of the success of the human rights movement in the courts, which led to convictions and brought the matter to the public eye. All of this created a more tangible threat to the interests of economic actors, leading to the subsequent backlash.

This first chapter sketches a brief conceptual history of reparations in international criminal justice and introduces some key concepts and terms used throughout the book. Chapter 1 shows how questions of justice in response to mass atrocities have been informed by two international normative demands: the ‘fight against impunity’ and the corresponding rise of international criminal justice; and the emergence of international human rights and the increasing attention paid to victims of crimes. These two main normative responses – punishment of perpetrators and redress for victims – gradually converged over time, laying the ground for the emergence of reparations mandates at international(-ised) criminal courts. That this was not a linear development is demonstrated by interrogating the absence of reparations at the two ad hoc international criminal tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

Chapter 9 focuses on transitional justice, the challenge of tackling past human rights violations, in contemporary Latin America. It shows that the record of Latin American countries varies considerably, but that, in the aggregate, the record of Latin America is largely a success story. The frequency with which past human rights violations have been addressed, and the steps taken through truth commissions and human rights trials, puts Latin America at the center of the global transitional justice movement. It also demonstrates, through a comparative analysis of six countries (Brazil and Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, Chile and Argentina), that several factors determine the response to past human rights violations. Democracies that are strong and channel citizen preferences succeed in confronting the challenge of transitional justice. Additionally, a strong record of transitional justice is associated with strong civil society organizations, generational change and new legal thinking about human rights law in the judiciary, and progressive developments in international law.

BHR is a fast-evolving interdisciplinary field and naturally its focus expands over time and new subdiscussions start to emerge. Such new discussions often appear at the intersection between BHR and other fields. This chapter briefly outlines four selected emerging discussions within the BHR field, namely: the intersection between BHR and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the relevance of climate change for BHR, gender perspectives on BHR, and BHR in post-conflict and transitional justice contexts.

This chapter identifies some of the broader effects of the social and legal invisibility of aesthetically unfamiliar atrocity processes beyond merely adding to the so-called impunity gap that afflicts international criminal justice. It does so by demonstrating how aesthetic biases favoring horrifically spectacular crimes not only undermines the goals and values ascribed to ICL itself, but also contributes to a variety of negative outcomes that go far beyond missed prosecutorial opportunities. ICL’s myopic focus on horrifically spectacular crimes raises a host of troubling questions concerning what harms are prioritized and whose interests are served by international criminal justice. This chapter considers some of these implications, specifically those relating to theories of punishment, and ICL’s role in shaping historical memory, how transitional justice, peacebuilding, human rights issues are framed and pursued, along with global justice more broadly.

National and international lawyers are ubiquitous in transitional political negotiations. However, their role in advancing or stalling negotiations, or in advocating or resisting progressive change, is generally carried out behind closed doors. This chapter explores when and how lawyers living and working within repressive, conflicted, and transitional states influence the content of transitional political agreements. It draws on twenty-five interviews with lawyers who participated directly in negotiations and other informed commentators in our case study sites. Combining this empirical data with literature on lawyers as negotiators, the sociology of the legal profession, and critical international legal theory, the chapter explores the factors that shape relationships between lawyers and the political leadership in negotiations. The chapter further critically analyses the extent to which lawyers’ negotiating styles and legal skills can advance or inhibit the reaching of an agreement. The final section explores the discretion and capacity of lawyer-negotiators for legal imagination in crafting transitional futures. We find that lawyer-negotiations often have to grapple with reconciling their role as legal technicians with the ethical and political challenges of advising on law’s content at times when the law itself is indeterminate or subject to negotiation.

There exists a vast body of scholarship, written from multiple disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives, exploring the complexities of resilience. It is striking, however, that resilience has received only limited attention in the context of communities and societies that have experienced conflict, violence and large-scale human rights abuses. It has similarly attracted little attention within the field of transitional justice. The book’s introduction sets out how and why this unique volume, which includes eight case studies, seeks to address these gaps. It proceeds to outline and discuss the three central strands that run through the book and weave the different chapters together, namely resilience (which the book approaches as a systemic and social ecological concept), transitional justice and de Coning’s adaptive peacebuilding. What this edited volume ultimately seeks to demonstrate is that thinking about resilience as a multi-systemic concept opens up a space for developing new ways of theorizing and operationalizing transitional justice that are more responsive to the wider social ecologies that link individuals and communities to their environments – and to the broader systems within which transitional justice work takes place. Responsiveness to these social ecologies and systems, in turn, is a crucial part of adaptive peacebuilding.

The use of rape was common during the 1971 war in Bangladesh. Six days after the war ended, the new government publicly declared that any woman raped in the war was a birangona or ‘war heroine’. There exists a public memory of wartime rape through various literary, visual and testimonial forms, ensuring that the raped woman endures as an iconic figure. However, women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence are often explained through the limited lenses of silence, voice, shame, honour, gender, patriarchy, stigma, trauma and ostracisation, which help to create the figure of the horrific raped woman – meaning that birangonas are often assumed to have a horrific life trajectory. This can undermine the very resilience that characterises many of the women who were raped. In contrast, this chapter focuses on generative resilience, as offering a different narrative of sexual violence that emphasises women’s abilities to continue to live with and pass on the experiences of sexual violence in ways that are uniquely relational. It is this contextualised and social ecological understanding of resilience that needs to inform adaptive peacebuilding, in order to foster a nuanced understanding of the effects of rape as a weapon of war.

This chapter reflects on the implications of resilience thinking for transitional justice as a transformative process that contributes to adaptive peacebuilding. It discusses how the concept creates space for new thinking about transitional justice and the potential dangers and opportunities afforded by a resilience approach. As part of this analysis, the chapter provides a critical appraisal of the overall approach to transitional justice that has dominated the field, considering transformative justice as an alternative perspective that challenges the hegemonic politico-legal, state-based, backward-looking retributive framework. It argues that resilience thinking supports a greater focus on psychosocial, community-based, forward-looking restorative approaches to transitional justice, consistent with the transformative turn in the field. It demonstrates this by exploring different understandings of justice, how they are pursued in the context of transitional justice and what they mean for building resilient societies after mass violence and human rights violations. The chapter further examines how various transitional justice mechanisms might contribute to individual, community and systemic societal resilience, while also recognising their limitations.

This chapter analyses different aspects of resilience, or the lack thereof, within the experiences of those affected by five decades of armed conflict in Colombia. Although resilience has long been understood in a person-centred way, this chapter argues that such personal aspects of resilience cannot be understood in isolation from broader socio-economic aspects such as work, social relations and communities’ wider developmental and infrastructural conditions. The chapter discusses whether and how transitional justice has addressed these issues in Colombia. Looking particularly at reparations, it demonstrates that transitional justice has predominantly taken a person-centric approach oriented towards monetary compensation, while disregarding the wider social, built and natural environment. It also explores how the needs of those affected by conflict can change over time and across conflict experiences and geographical spaces. This necessarily requires an ongoing analysis of locally-specific needs and conditions, in line with the core elements of adaptive peacebuilding. The chapter concludes with reflections on how transitional justice, including the restorative justice sentences which will be applied by Colombia’s most recent transitional justice mechanism – the Special Jurisdiction for Peace – could help to promote the resilience that conflict-affected communities need to move forward.

This chapter explores the tensions between resilience models of recovery, adaptive peacebuilding and transitional justice by examining the 1994 genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda, its aftermath and the country’s recovery processes. Rwanda has been lauded as a success story for post-genocide recovery, peacebuilding and transitional justice. Yet, a closer look demonstrates that its recovery and peacebuilding reinforced a centralised state and the ruling party’s dominance. These processes produced the appearance of stability and resilience while hiding new hierarchies and social divides that risk generating conflict in the future. Adaptive peacebuilding efforts led by local non-governmental organisations, on the other hand, responded directly to ordinary people’s immediate needs without promoting political agendas. Government-led transitional justice efforts often disrupted these local successes and ultimately benefitted the nation-state at the expense of community healing. The lessons learned from the Rwanda case point to the importance of tending to local-level concerns in recovery processes and of employing peacebuilding approaches that focus on broad notions of positive peace instead of only state-building. In addition, resilience models of recovery must consider micro- and macro-level concerns and pay attention to the impact of political power on outcomes.

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 concept of resilience is best understood as a process whereby individual capital and social capital intersect in ways that create optimal outcomes in stressed environments. As a process, resilience can look very different in different contexts, with any single system (including systems that promote economic and environmental justice, human rights, and law enforcement ) showing patterns of persistence, resistance, recovery, adaptation or transformation depending on the resources that each system has available to support positive change. This chapter explores these processes and how they affect systems simultaneously at multiple levels. This understanding of resilience as a multi-systemic concept can help to explain how transitional justice processes and the broader systems with which they interact (both judicial and non-judicial) respond to stressors, thereby shaping how individuals, communities and institutions deal with adversity and shocks. Brief case examples are used to show how resilience changes depending on a population’s exposure to extreme forms of potentially traumatising events like war, forced migration, genocide and chronic economic disruption.