Description
The concept of transformative justice has been, with few exceptions, widely theorized from outside the post-Yugoslav space, and then ‘applied’ to it. While presenting itself as an alternative to the universalising, legalistic, and institutional focus of the liberal transitional justice model of the 1990s, transformative justice has developed without accounting for the experiences of violence and struggles for justice that emerged in the post-Yugoslav space, and that are interwoven with transnational histories of oppression, dispossession, and resistance. Building on a reflexive analysis of empirical material on post-Yugoslav justice movements in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, the paper rethinks the concept of transformative justice as a vehicle that allows us to work towards justice in pluriversal terms. It focuses on the meaning of transformation and change, and the kind of harms that give rise to transformation, and agency within these processes. Speaking to the calls for provincializing IR and thinking from the spaces that are not visible in theorizing from the anglophone core, the article engages with contested temporalities and ideas of change, intersectional harms, and with different genealogies of transformation to theorise transformative justice as if the post-Yugoslav space, land, landscapes, and its peoples mattered.
