Description
Transitional justice (TJ), processes of seeking redress for past and ongoing violence, has become increasingly professionalised as a global justice discourse. TJ ‘entrepreneurs’ (Madlingozi 2010) constitute a global TJ industry (Nagy 2008) that develops standardised policies and toolkits to be implemented across diverse TJ contexts. While there are plural approaches to TJ, many of which disrupt the universalised discourse, international organisations and practitioners are frequently understood as the producers of TJ expertise. This construction of who embodies expertise (and therefore also who lacks it) reflects longstanding colonial and epistemic hierarchies, with international actors dominating TJ policymaking and knowledge practices despite growing discursive commitments to local agency and expertise. In this paper, I trace how TJ expertise is constructed at the United Nations (UN), one of the most visible institutions of standardised TJ (Davidian and Kenney 2017). Informed by scholarship on the politics of TJ knowledge (Jones and Lühe 2021), I map the UN’s TJ policy ecosystem and identify what expertise means, which actors are constructed as embodying expertise, and what thematic areas constitute the UN’s expertise. This is important for understanding the broader politics of TJ expertise and for amplifying diverse TJ knowledges and advancing epistemic justice.