Description
Prevention of conflict and its recurrence is one of the key aspects of the UN Secretary-General’s Our Common Agenda. Guarantees of non-recurrence, understood largely as measures of legal and institutional reform, have been a part and parcel of transitional justice interventions in the past few decades. This narrow understanding of what preventing future conflicts entails is drawn from international law. However, there has been very little theorising of the concept in the field of transitional justice and even less imagining of what fulfilling the famous ‘Never Again’ could entail in post-conflict spaces where transitional justice is a lived experience and not merely a matter of implementation of legal measures. This paper takes an intersubjective, structuration approach to non-recurrence of conflict and conceptualises transitional justice as both a project, consisting of laws, policies and mechanisms and a lived experience which is shaped and reshaped in everyday practice. Based on extensive interviews with transitional justice practitioners in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article explores what the encounters between the structure of transitional justice and its agents can tell us about the seeking and maintaining of guarantees of non-recurrence in the aftermath of conflict resolution. It demonstrates numerous ways in which the global project of transitional justice has served not as a terminator but as a source of anxiety around potential conflict repetition in Bosnia and has had significant detrimental effects on the perceptions of both states’ ontological security and human security. The paper proposes that guarantees of non-recurrence in transitional justice practice should be reconceptualized not as a reform of the state and its institutions but as an absence of anxiety about conflict recurrence among individuals as well as states, therefore having the potential to shape future international transitional justice practices.
