The Art of Justice: Roles, Performance and Audience in Human Rights and Transitional Justice

Recognition of the limitations within the formal application and study of human rights and transitional justice mechanisms has grown. Increasingly, conventional spaces and approaches to research and practice in these fields are questioned and criticized for failing to meet their inclusive, transformative and agentic ambitions. How can (and do) the fields of human rights and transitional justice respond to this crisis of fact? Innovation in response to this crisis has increasingly recognized the existence, contributions and potential of unconventional expressions of human rights and transitional justice. For example, within transitional justice a growing body of research looks to the arts as meaningful spaces for the pursuit of truth-telling, reconciliation and resistance. Demands to address the legacies of colonial violence within the field of transitional justice have also brought to the fore the issue of restitution of looted art and plundered cultural heritage. Within human rights, social media is gaining recognition as a significant space for both the advancement and abuse of human rights. Across both fields, criticisms against western hegemony in human rights and transitional justice norms as a largely empty performance of justice are calling for the centralization of indigenous knowledge systems and practices. Such conceptual and empirical expansions are simultaneously creating new epistemological opportunities, challenges and debates around how to do research within an evolving understanding of these fields. Unifying these strands of research is the need to expand the gaze of transitional justice and human rights, beyond its formal mechanisms, to recognize the existence, contributions and potential of its unconventional embodiments. This Section aims to place scholars at different stages of their career in conversation with each other, to encourage, inspire and challenge a new generation of political scientists. Section Chairs therefore encourage submissions from early career as well as established scholars. The Section aims to create an intellectual community that fosters inspiring conversations and exchanges throughout the General Conference and beyond (e.g. through joint publication projects after the conference, such as blog contributions or a Special Issue).