Description
Transitional justice (TJ) has historically struggled with understanding actors in their full complexity. This trend is evident in its difficulty in dealing with ‘imperfect victims’ - victims who may also have perpetrated crimes or whose experiences contradict the idea of victims as innocent (Weber 2021). Part of the underlying problem centres around the insistence within dominant TJ approaches on binary oppositions (Turner 2017): agent vs. subject, victim vs. perpetrator, peace vs. justice, etc. These binary oppositions make it difficult for groups that experience marginalisation and oppression, including along gender-based lines, to also achieve recognition of their agency. This paper offers a new way forward for conceptualising agency in a TJ context and making space for the exercise of this agency. Our argument is twofold: first, that focussing on relational autonomy rather than a liberal conception of agency helps produce a more holistic picture of the constraints and opportunities affecting agents’ actions in broad social networks; and second, that creating agonistic spaces, which centre around contestation and multiplicity, in turn fosters opportunities for an increased exercise and recognition of relational autonomy. Using original interview data and archival analysis from Northern Ireland and Turkey, we demonstrate how these agonistic spaces can facilitate relational autonomy across the spectrum of formal and informal TJ arenas. In their embrace of multiplicity and rejection of a single objective truth, these agonistic spaces are better equipped to recognise the ways in which actors can be both victims and perpetrators, marginalised and empowered. This approach offers a new way forward for TJ scholars and practitioners looking to recognise the full range of identities actors can hold simultaneously.