Conclusion to the Symposium on Reframing Transitional Justice: Walking With and Together

[Mark A. Drumbl is Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director of Transnational Law Institute, Washington and Lee University.

Kirsten J. Fisher is an Associate Professor with the Department of Political Studies, University of Saskatchewan.]

These five commentaries are so much more than interlocutions or interventions. Indeed, they feel like expansions of the community of the book itself, as if we now have twenty-one contributors rather than sixteen.  Frédéric Mégret’s lovely observation that he wanted to walk with the group, rather than write about the group, seems to have — organically and mysteriously, dare we say coincidentally – proven contagious. We are delighted that this project has inspired growth and reflection rather than the mis-fire of cross-fire.

Ligeia Quackelbeen elegantly and creatively breaks the ice through the lens of science fiction from 1974, in particular, Ursula Le Guin’s gripping novel The Dispossessed. Ligeia sets forth how this tall tale takes readers to the planets of Urras and Anarres – one capitalist, the other (the latter) anarchist – and examines life on these planets through the movements and equations of Shevek, a brilliant physicist, who seeks to bridge both worlds. Ligeia colorfully takes The Dispossessed as a metaphor for the place of science in various worlds – the politics and contestations and positionalities – and reminds us that the scientization of transitional justice is something to gingerly approach. 

Ligeia’s teleporting from this fantastical yet eerily factual novel to the fantasies and fabulations of transitional justice is a gem. One of us (Mark) also by coincidence is familiar with the nonfiction-fables in The Dispossessed.  Ligeia’s commentary gets him thinking of a line by Bedap in The Dispossessed. Bedap is among the misfits on Anarres, the anarchist ‘social conscience’ prison planet.  Bedap’s line maps onto the final sentence of Mark’s chapter in Reframing Transitional Justice, on fascist cultural property in Italy, namely, where Mark calls for the abolition of attention, which is a theme that Ligeia turns towards and faces. Mark’s line chimes and rhymes with Bedap’s exhortation, in a dialogue with Shevek (the two are confidants), in which Bedap exclaims: ‘You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them’ (Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974, 2024, Harper & Row, New York, p. 150). Here, too, is something to ruminate about. The extent to which transitional justice seeks to reprogram and control – to crush ideas – fills it with coerciveness and expansiveness. Maybe, sometimes, it is just better to let things go. Or let things be. Not to have a need for interventions, and hence not to require delimitations and boundaries, but rather just gaze at open horizons, a calmness and stillness, serendipity, to roll with it, to not pay too much attention. To be sure, this is a theme central to Reframing Transitional Justice – for Ligeia ‘the most fundamental question running through this volume’ — namely, the balance between intervention and restraint.

Ligeia’s icebreaker moves seamlessly into Julia Emtseva’s heart-felt call for a place for anarchism in transitional justice. What would transitional justice look like if it were radically uncoupled from states? How about an organic transitional justice that flows bottom-up and unstructured in taverns, living rooms, football fields, cafés, bedrooms, town halls, piazzas, subway trains, dog runs, cattle cars, and street corners? Would a libertarian theory of transitional justice offer any guardrails against vengeance? Julia nimbly mines this space. She worries about how the state co-opts transitional justice. She worries – justifiably – about Ligeia’s concern of the politicization of transitional justice. Indeed, as transitional justice increasingly becomes a process – a procedure, a best practice — this metamorphosis decouples it from normativity and standardizes its use and vocabulary. It should not come as a surprise that US President Donald Trump explicitly invoked transitional justice vocabulary in the summer of 2026 calling for a ‘Truth and Justice Commission’ and in seeking to establish a compensation fund of $1,776,000,000 to pay claims made by alleged victims of government ‘weaponization’ (namely unfair prosecutions and show trials) initiated during the predecessor Biden Administration.

Julia propounds a prefigurative approach ‘rooted in heterarchy, mutual aid, and collective autonomy’ that delivers ‘the values of the society they strive to build’. Anarchism, for Julia, is a tradition ‘that insists that the means of political action must embody the ends they seek to achieve’. The ‘they’ are the victims. While governments may change, the state endures, and governments support the unchanged state, more often than not, so transformative potential lies in the people.

Julia’s commentary fits snugly onto Ligeia’s icebreaker with The Dispossessed. An anarchist transitional justice presumably is what Anarres would develop. This means that life on Anarres might have something to say about the life of anarchist transitional justice. But life on Anarres is chilly cold and tightly controlled. True, Anarres has no formal state. True, citizens are rather free. True, equality among genders is deeply ingrained. Yet, although Anarres lacks a state, it squirms in the strangulation triggered by the ‘social conscience’. The ‘social conscience’ constantly torments the population. Hypocrisy is literally painful. Thinking too much about oneself is derided as ‘egoizing’. Focusing too much on how one looks is condemned as ‘body profiteering’. Romance and passion is suppressed, really, all this beauty is drearily mechanized in the term ‘copulating’. Enjoying too much, having seconds, is akin to ‘excess’ … and excess ‘is excrement’.  Anarres is supposed to be anarchist, but it is socially rigid and judgmental and righteous and always using shame and self-sacrifice to monitor. Shevek is right to bemoan that, on Anarres, ‘we don’t cooperate – we obey … we fear being outcast … we force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it’ (p. 308). This prompts a crucial observation: in societies it is not only the state that binds and controls. It can also be communal norms and the ‘social conscience’. It can also be the domination of memory, or a single memory, a point we will come back to later on in the contribution by María Estrada-Fuentes. 

Julia digs down, it seems, to embrace the local and the communal in her quest to de-center the state. And indeed states can be violent and cruel, they can initiate pogroms and punishments, mass murder of revolutionaries, like on Urras, where they crush rebellions, and they can become utterly ‘propertarian’ and steal ideas from their creators and declare them the goods of the state, again like on Urras. But Shevek’s ideas – his brilliant physics theories – also were appropriated and stolen on anarchist Anarres, this being by the sleazy and despicable Sabul, his senior colleague, who insists that, in order to be published, Shevek must list Sabul as the lead author, even though Sabul has contributed not an iota or whit thereto, and that Shevek must do so in the name of communalism even though the true motivation is Sabul’s personal selfishness and deplorable insecurity. There are plenty of other sources of harm and pain and abuse and control other than the state. And if transitional justice becomes arranged by these other sources, they too need to be invigilated. Julia guards against this wisely. She insists on the anarchist potential ‘to analyze justice not simply as state or non-state, but whether it is non-dominating, whether those subject to its norms can make, contest, and revise them.’  Julia’s end game, this idea of returning the ‘justice’ into transitional and linking justice to participatory openness,  resonates deeply with the contributions throughout this volume with their focus on both the T and the J in TJ.

Frédéric Mégret’s words flow from Julia’s. Julia laments transitional justice’s ‘attachment to the state’. Fred pitters to a similar patter. He makes a detailed, rich, and compelling case for shifting the ‘unit of analysis’ of transitional justice. For him, this unit currently situates in the national. And he is tired of it. He casts transitional justice’s ‘methodological nationalism’ as its ‘most persistent blind spot’.  He observes how transitional justice ‘constructs itself deliberately as an exceptional liberal cure to a liberal problem’. Didactically, while Julia inclines towards the local as a renewed space, Fred arches towards the transnational, international, global and diasporic. For Fred, these terms each and all are chiral (to borrow a word I learned from Windell Nortje), namely, similar but not identical, geometrically not being able to be stacked one on top of the other. Within these complex molecular structures of justice, the category of ‘exiles’ matters greatly to Fred and this leads him to reconsider the salience of universal jurisdiction.  Fred identifies the transnational nature of so much violence – and the inter-state possibility of peace and reckoning — and how seeing atrocities ‘in national terms pre-empts certain reckonings and emancipatory possibilities’. 

Fred’s hefty contribution gestures towards what, exactly, is meant by community and collectivity. And here, to be sure, the community of virtuality – including artificial intelligence (AI) — looms large. Virtual reality increasingly is a wordy misnomer insofar as this space is more akin to reality tout court. For many people, life lived in the ether is life really lived, meaningfully lived, such that it is not virtual reality but real virtuality.  Here, an extensive lacework arises with Part I of Reframing Transitional Justice, whose chapters deal extensively with technology. Colleen Murphy in Chapter 2 sensitively examines efforts undertaken by Holocaust museums to harness AI  technology so as to re-create interactive visitor experiences through holograms of victims. Murphy’s work on virtuality and memory in museums hints at the broader use of virtuality in the location of memory generally, for example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina where a new ‘Virtual Memories’ app (geared towards younger people) allows users to access virtual memories at sites of war crimes in the country that have never yet been officially marked. In Chapter 4, Christopher Lamont unpacks how AI and machine learning transform a wide range of truth-seeking processes associated with transitional justice.  Delegating investigative function to technology, while certainly bringing some benefits, also generates problematic visibilities and invisibilities. Once again, caution is in order. And, in Chapter 5, Laura Gianna Guntrum, Maike Salzmann, and Christian Reuter take the reader to Colombia.  Granular research conducted by these scholars reveals that the Facebook activity of Colombia’s transitional justice institutions in 2019 evinces a predominance of one-way communication. These national institutions primarily deployed the platform to disseminate information about their mandates rather than foster interactive or participatory exchanges with users.  

The Colombian experience is inspirational and troubling all at once. It bursts with agency and beauty, while also redounding with woe. Despite two decades of intense and extensive transitional justice efforts in Colombia, violence persists. Indeed, the recruitment of child soldiers in Colombia has palpably increased in recent years. The International Committee of the Red Cross has reported that the impact of armed conflict on civilians in Colombia in 2025 was the worst in a decade. What to make of this? 

Colombia is the beginning and end point for María Estrada-Fuentes’ brilliant contribution to this symposium. María goes directly to the heart of a catalytic theme of this volume, to wit, the meaning and manufacture of memory, notably, the memories of girl soldiers as part of their transitional journey to civilian life. María draws extensively from her unique experience in Colombia, to wit, the perspective of arts-based work as transitional justice. María alters our imageries from Belfast and Dalí to Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee, notably, Klee’s angel. And on this note María aims not to invoke the divine, but rather the lightness of memory, not lightness in terms of content or weight, but lightness in terms of brightness, namely, the process by which memory is made – not made as in manufactured but, rather, as delicately woven – and as something that is light because it is the inspired product of community and interactivity, woven in harmony, in which the process of remembering is also the process of including. For María, ‘[a]rt practice and symbolic work can contribute to creating the right conditions for victims’ recognition, for their voices to be heard.’ María’s emphasis on film, dance, theatre and monument centralizes the notion of ‘popular’ justice, which is another related but chiral element to the communalism of anarchist thought and the ‘propertarian’ nature of ‘expertise’ that Ligeia posits as potentially problematic. María also gestures towards the ‘unit of analysis’ problem that Fred raises. María reminds us that there is a unit that gets too little attention because it is so small, but this unit is probably the most powerful. That unit is the individual, the one person. The individual matters, greatly, her stories, her experiences, her future.

Our symposium wraps up with Saheli Chakraborty’s powerful analysis of Part III of Reframing Transitional Justice, this being the part that focuses on refractions: autocracy, race, and gender. Saheli’s incisive commentary locates the power of the popular in channeling justice claims in this space. Her analysis is a wonderful complement to Julia and Fred’s in light of her skepticism of the predominant role of the state in all this (‘justice … often needs to be constructed from within and beneath existing structures’), while also walking with María in the embrace of inclusive memory-making. Saheli, unlike Ligeia, sees potentiality in the erasure of boundaries – for example, the artifice of the boundaries between times of war and times of peace since violence can pervade both. Other examples include the artifice of the boundaries between official institutions and local lives, and the boundaries between victims’ groups in which certain groups become privileged and others invisibilized.  

Saheli buzzingly references Salvador Dalí’s well-known painting ‘The Persistence of Memory’ by observing how boundaries and categories warp underlying realities and refract harms into unrecognisable shapes. Insofar as Reframing Transitional Justice begins with Dalí’s Untitled (Dreams of Venus), it is fitting to conclude this symposium with Saheli’s invocation of Dalí’s Persistence of Memory.

Here, too, like in Untitled (Dreams of Venus) we are faced with a flat, parched, barren plain. However, here sits a dead tree, broken but still with one branch, that supports — along with other sloped or edged surfaces — time as a gelatinous mass. The shapelessness of time indeed suggests the futility of boundaries, yet this shapelessness is contoured by the unyielding structures on which time has glommed itself. These structures endure. Reframing Transitional Justice seeks to focus the discussion on such structures and to interrogate them. The book does not presage a direction. Nor does it predetermine an answer. It embodies a journey – a walk chock-full of talk – that is wise and calm, that seeds growth rather than anxiety, that draws inspiration from María’s bright light. 

Photo attribution: Markus Spiske on Unsplash