Justice Visions

What role does documentation play in the pursuit of truth and justice in context of ongoing violence? In this new Justice Visions podcast episode, we take up this question by exploring documentation practices in Mexico, a context marked by an ongoing and deeply complex crisis of enforced disappearances. With more than 133,000 people officially registered as disappeared and numbers continuing to ri...

Justice Visions' new research project - GROUNDOC - focuses on the role of documentation in transitional justice processes. In this mini-series of the podcast, we explore documentation practices across a range of cases that are part of the GROUNDOC project. This episode focuses on Uganda where the transitional justice process can be traced back to the peace negotiations between the government o...

In this new episode of our mini-series on documentation and archiving, co-hosts Kim Baudewijns and Gretel Mejía Bonifazi explore how community actors in Guatemala are reimagining archiving and documentation practices today. Guatemala is known for its longstanding civil society efforts in truth-seeking,accountability, reparations, and memory. Yet, as our guests show, these practices are not static:...

In this new episode of the mini-series on documentation practices, we turn to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Together with Dr. Valérie Arnould, Legal and Policy Advisor on transitional justice with the international NGO Avocats Sans Frontières (ASF), we explore the challenges and possibilities of documenting human rights violations in a country marked by protracted violence, impunity,...

In this new episode of the mini-series on documentation, we continue the conversation on documentation and archiving practices together with Eva Willems and Mina Ibrahim. Eva Willems is a post-doctoral researcher at the History Department and the Department of Conflict and Development Studies of Ghent University. She examines how peasant militias in Peru use archives to organize life amid conflict...

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast turns the spotlight on the role of documentation in transitional justice. This theme will guide much of our future work as Tine Destrooper ’s project GROUNDOC “Innovation and documentation: Reconstructing the paradigm of transitional justice from the ground up” was awarded an ERC Grant. In this conversation Tine Destrooper, Brigitte Herremans, and Elk...

In this special episode of Justice Visions, we shift our typical focus on innovations in transitional justice to a broader debate about international law, its shortcomings, and how to rethink it in ways that benefit victim-survivors of gross human rights violations. We do so on the occasion of the inaugural Lecture of the Amnesty International Chair at Ghent University, which this year was given b...

On December 8, 2024 the unthinkable happened: the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. This new episode of the Justice Visions podcast explores how the mobilization for justice shapes up in the post-Assad era. Brigitte Herremans is joined by our new colleague, Layla Zibar,  an urban researcher who focuses on the spatio-temporal dimensions of forced displacements and justice. Together they examine wh...

This new episode zooms in on the invisibilization of certain voices in transitional justice discourse and practice, namely LGBTQIA+ and children’s perspectives, whose lives and experiences have been excluded from most formal and informal transitional justice initiatives.   Our guests, Pascha Bueno-Hansen and Caitlin Biddolph , both conduct research on transitional justice issues from LGBTQIA+, int...

In this new episode we zoom in on an oft-overlooked dimension of victim participation in formal transitional justice processes, namely the labor that victims invest in justice processes. In a conversation with professor Leila Ulrich , we explore the intricate relationship between the ICC’s engagement with victims and the global capitalist systems in which the court operates. The dynamics of under-...

We kick off this new season of the Justice Visions podcast with a set of conversations that we initiated during the recent  Justice Visions Conference, exploring victim participation, mobilization, and resistance within the realm of transitional justice. In this first episode of these miniseries, we shed light on victims driving transitional justice efforts in Turkey and Tunisia. Our guests, Dr. S...

The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this third episode of the miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization and documentation efforts in Afghanistan, and reflect on the merits of arts-based approaches, as well as the challenges posed by such approaches. Sophia Bijleveld Milosevic is a member of...

The new miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memory and memorialization. In this second episode of these miniseries, we shed a light on memorialization efforts through embroidery practices in Shatila camp in Beirut. Since the increasing repression by the Assad regime and the war in Syria, there has been a large influx of refugees into...

The latest miniseries of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the current debates and discussions surrounding memorialization as the fifth pillar of transitional justice. The miniseries foreground innovative grassroots memorialization efforts from a wide array of contexts dealing with impunity, revisionism and lack of political will. This episode focuses on the vibrant memorialization landscape...

Between 1956 and 2011, Tunisia endured decades of authoritarian rule under Presidents Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The Tunisian Revolution in 2011 led to the ousting of Ben Ali and catalysed the start of the institutional transitional justice process. Yet, mobilisation against authoritarian rule and the curtailment of basic freedoms also predated the establishment of this formal pr...

The new season of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on issues surrounding victim participation, mobilization and resistance. It focuses on debates that will also be addressed during the upcoming Justice Visions conference , taking place 13-15 March 2024, in Ghent (Belgium) and online. In this episode, we talk about the methodological challenges of doing research on victims’ lived experiences of...

The new episode of Justice Visions takes a distinct approach. In response to the escalating violence in Palestine and Israel following the Hamas attacks on October 7th and Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip, we felt compelled to address these critical issues of justice and accountability. Our focus today are these international crimes occurring in an environment where impunity prevails.

The new season of the Justice Visions podcast focuses on the issue of victim participation, mobilization and resistance. This dedicated focus aligns with the overarching theme of the J ustice Visions conference , taking place in March 2024. Our first episode centers on institutional innovation and its symbiotic relationship with victim participation. This is a dynamic interplay where, on one hand,...

In this special episode of the Justice Visions podcast we go back to the core of the Justice Visions research project and explore important evolutions in how we think about the complex notions of victimhood and victim participation within the field of transitional justice. Together with Cheryl Lawther and Tine Destrooper, we talk how the recent expansion of transitional justice, the diverse range...

The final episode of the Justice Visions miniseries on the revolutionary potential of transitional justice zooms in on the relationship between protest, artistic practices and transitional justice in South Sudan. This might seem not be the most obvious choice for such a miniseries, as transitional justice is a relatively new concept in the world’s youngest nation, which has endured decades of viol...

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast is the third episode of a miniseries that looks into the revolutionary potential of transitional justice in current protests, when social movements use it in non-scripted innovative ways. In this episode we examine how US-based activists demanding reparations for slavery and its ongoing legacy, tap into the disruptive potential of transitional justice...

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast is a second episode of a miniseries that looks into the revolutionary potential of transitional justice in current protest. In this episode we examine the wave of recent protests and severe state violence in Peru. We link the aftermath of leftist ex-President Pedro Castillo’s failed coup d’état on December 7th 2022 and people’s demands to Peru’s forme...

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast is a first episode of a miniseries that explores the revolutionary potential of transitional justice. Recently, an evolution can be observed in which grassroots actors are increasingly mobilizing the rhetoric and tools of transitional justice as an element of their protest repertoire. These expressions of transitional justice co-exist with state-centr...

In May 2022, Ferdinand ‘Bong Bong’ Marcos, the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos won the presidential elections in the Philippines. The vice-presidential elections were won by Sara Duterte, daughter of the former authoritarian president Rodrigo Duterte. What does the election of the son of a former dictator tell us about the Philippines’ transitional justice process? What to make of the hist...

The new episode of the Justice Visions podcast is last episode of the miniseries on historical truth-seeking initiatives in the (post-)colonial state. Recently, Europe has experienced a boom of state-led and informal initiatives to address the legacies of the colonial past and its enduring harms in the present. In this episode we zoom out from the particular truth initiatives in European countries...