Description
In its rhetoric, the United Nations foregrounds the importance of individual accountability for human rights violations. It also emphasizes the importance of transitional justice in which individual survivors deserve recognition for their suffering and should take a central place in decisions on what happens after periods of violent unrest. These commitments are in line with the central tenets of human security, another key discursive element of the UN’s work, that calls for putting people front and center in the organization’s conflict response. People working in and on UN peace operations have put considerable effort into mainstreaming this approach in the organization’s accountability work. However, this commitment runs into several obstacles on the ground. This paper analyzes these challenges in the context of the UN’s efforts to support transitional justice efforts in the Central African Republic, where the UN has an exceptionally extensive mandate to promote accountability for atrocity crimes. This paper argues that variance in understandings of transitional justice between the host state, the different interveners, and the local population, complicates the implementation of a human security agenda in the UN’s transitional justice work. These differences center around the facts that the focus on individuals does not necessarily match local expectations and that the emphasis on criminal justice limits attention to other initiatives. In addition, the state-centered nature of the UN poses a significant challenge to people-centered approaches in international interventions.
