Panel 36: Transition and Justice: Negotiating the Terms of New Beginnings in Africa
Panel organisers: Gerhard Anders (Univ. of Zurich, Switzerland) and Olaf Zenker (Univ. of Bern, Switzerland)
Contact: anders@access.uzh.ch
| Political transitions in Africa are often characterised by intense debates about how to deal with past injustices and how to realise justice in the future. Transnationally circulating ideas, state laws as well as local aspirations thereby converge in complex assemblages in which the terms for such new beginnings are being negotiated and contested. This panel invites papers that trace such negotiations with regard to the following interrelated themes:
• Debates about how to come to terms with human rights violations, war crimes and genocide have focused on truth commissions, war crimes tribunals as well as other forms of moralmaterial restitution (such as land reforms). These institutions are crucially shaped by transnationally circulating models of transitional justice, while claiming to meet local demands for justice. From the perspective of ordinary Africans, however, these institutions often rather advance a neo‐colonial agenda or local elite interests. Here we seek contributions that explore the various responses to and consequences of the promise of justice embodied in such transitional institutions. • Foreign interventions aimed at stabilising regional peace or, at least, the “bare life” of affected populations have constituted another dimension of new beginnings in Africa. These interventions have had profound economic, social and political consequences and influenced African debates about a just order, whilst being shaped in often unforeseen ways by the local settings they are operating in. Here contributions could analyse the tensions between a universalistic ethic of compassion and local conceptions of responsible, legitimate and moral behaviour. |