Transitional justice (TJ) is the field of scholarship and practice that examines how societies deal with the consequences of massive human rights violations. A decade of critical TJ scholarship may create an impression of a field in crisis. Yet, TJ practice seems to be thriving: TJ language and initiatives are travelling to increasingly diverse contexts, which are often very different from those in which TJ emerged. Examples are TJ initiatives to address ongoing conflict or historical injustice. The manifestations of TJ in these ‘aparadigmatic’ cases are often so distinct that they challenge the foundation of the TJ paradigm. Notably the innovations, ambitions, and experimentation happening in these cases invite for a rethinking of TJ's standard mechanisms and objectives, which currently revolve around the pillars of justice, truth, reparation, non-recurrence and memorialisation.

This project goes beyond definitional debates over whether these processes are ‘real’ instances of TJ. Instead, I argue that properly theorizing the innovations happening in these aparadigmatic cases is crucial to close the emerging gap between theory and practice, and that it can even be a way to address some of the most pressing critiques of paradigmatic TJ.

I will use a mixed-method actor-oriented approach to analyse the practices and ambitions of grassroots justice actors in 6 aparadigmatic cases. This analysis will foreground documentation initiatives because there is significant innovation happening in this realm, and because documentation’s central role across all TJ initiatives means that this innovation has the potential to amend the entire paradigm. I will adopt an eco-systemic analytical framework to examine how (innovations in) documentary practices interact with and affect other (transitional) justice initiatives. I then build on this empirical analysis to reconstruct the TJ paradigm from the ground up. The envisioned outcome is a practice-informed and future-oriented TJ paradigm.

This application should be seen as seed funding to develop and finetune new quantitative methods that will be used in the broader project.