Description
Over the last decades, transitional justice has witnessed a shift of focus from perpetrators towards victims and a growing emphasis on victim participation. In line with calls to put victims’ agency in the spotlight, this paper wants to highlight victims’ role as collective political actors in transitional justice processes by zooming in on victim mobilisation around reparations, accountability, and truth-finding in Morocco.
As an aparadigmatic case of transitional justice where the elite showed limited interest in dealing with the past and no regime change occurred, Morocco is a fascinating case to study the role of victims in bringing about and shaping transitional justice and draws our attention to the capacity of survivors to position themselves and to raise demands towards the state in the midst of and despite limiting structures. A political situation best described as ‘transition within continuation‘ (Loudiy 2014: 82) furthermore means that mobilisation around transitional justice mirrors broader struggles around power and democratisation. Based on empirical insights, the Moroccan victim movement’s struggle for a meaningful transitional justice process will be analysed to shed light on the role of survivors as transitional justice actors that both resist official transitional politics and strategically push for their own transitional justice agenda.
