Everyday Transformative Gender Justice: Photo-Voices from Colombia

Abstract

Transitional justice, as a field of scholarship and practice, aims to address past wrongdoings of authoritarian regimes and armed conflicts. However, critical scholarship has convincingly pointed to problematic aspects of the field, including its legalistic bias and one-size-fits-all interventions. Transformative justice has emerged as an alternative to mainstream transitional justice. This proposal prioritises local needs and agency while addressing unequal power relations that underpin violent conflicts. Yet, the transformative model remains largely normative without sufficient empirical grounding.
To address this gap, my PhD thesis proposes an everyday transformative gender justice framework that centres on the needs and demands of so-called ordinary people living in transitional and conflict-affected contexts. To develop the framework, I draw on the transformative justice literature, but also from radical feminist scholars and the everyday peace literature. Further, the framework is empirically informed by data from two participatory photography projects in Cauca, Colombia, as well as documents and interviews with representatives from Colombia’s transitional justice institutions.
Based on the empirical data of my research in Colombia, I make three main arguments on how transitional justice can be more transformative. First, it needs to address violence as a continuum of direct and structural violence that affects people’s lives. Second, a transformative view of transitional justice must tackle gender-based violence as a continuum of violence that manifests in both violent and ‘peaceful’ times, while taking issues of care, masculinities and femininities seriously. Third, transformative justice needs to provide redress for economic, social, and cultural rights through redistribution and recognition measures.
By contrasting how everyday voices and institutional actors frame the transformative potential of transitional justice, I contribute to an understanding of how exactly transitional justice can be more transformative for the people who need it the most.