Much has been written about victims’ myriad roles in transitional justice processes. Many of these writings critique how victims have been involved in formal institutional transitional justice processes, and point to a range of undesirable consequences of how their participation is typically conceptualised. Critical transitional justice studies highlight, for example, the risks of secondary trauma and inadequate psycho-social support, the disconnect between victims’ expectations and process outcomes, the dominance of technocratic or formalistic approaches, the instrumentalisation of victim groups, or the hierarchisation of victimisation experiences. The depth and breadth of these critiques frequently extend to challenge the foundational principles of the broader transitional justice project itself. This sense of crisis is exacerbated by the global resurgence of anti-rights politics, the (re-)emergence of regimes with authoritarian tendencies – even in countries that have previously implemented comprehensive transitional justice programmes – and a feeling of crisis surrounding human rights more generally.

In spite of this, victim movements across a range of contexts increasingly harness the principles, language, and mechanisms of transitional justice as a mobilising framework in their various justice struggles, all the while bringing new issues to more formal transitional justice processes. Various dynamics can be observed. First, transitional justice practices are increasingly proposed in struggles that have limited affinity with early transitional justice contexts, for example, grassroots actors proposing transitional justice initiatives in contexts of ongoing conflict. Second, transitional justice language is finding its way into a wide variety of justice struggles that, at face value, hardly share commonalities with paradigmatic transitional justice cases, from efforts to address abuse within the Catholic Church, to campaigns against extra-judicial killings in the war on drugs, to resistance against oil extractivism. Third, justice actors in paradigmatic cases are increasingly challenging the boundaries between transitional justice and other justice struggles by inserting new topics into transitional justice processes, such as the role of corporate actors in human rights violations. This proliferation of transitional justice into a wide range of intersecting justice struggles is genuinely victim-driven. Yet it leaves scholars, practitioners, and policymakers grappling with existential debates concerning the nature and modalities of transitional justice itself, and of victims’ roles therein.

This handbook emerges from these debates, but also offers new entry points into them. It provides a systematic investigation of how victims’ engagement in transitional justice processes has evolved over time, and of the diverging theoretical viewpoints that have been used to understand and evaluate this engagement. Drawing on this analysis, this introduction develops a future-oriented analytical framework that offers the reader a better historical understanding of victims’ evolving roles in (formal and informal) transitional justice processes, as well as providing a comparative outlook on the realities of victim engagement today, acknowledging intersecting justice struggles and the porous boundaries of transitional justice. This framework will be the foundation for a future-oriented re-imagining of victims’ protagonism in pursuing justice after large-scale violence.

While both this introduction and several contributions borrow the notion of ‘victim’ from mainstream transitional justice scholarship, we reject any connotations of passivity or ‘idealised victimhood’. Instead, the book builds on the notion of ‘victims-as-protagonists’, foregrounding victims as drivers of justice struggles, as well as acknowledging the violence they experienced (Méndez Reference Méndez2016; Tuyuc Reference Tuyuc2024). Importantly, this viewpoint of transitional justice as inherently victim-driven, while seemingly intuitive, should not be taken for granted. Early instances of transitional justice, such as post-World War II tribunals, while responding to the harm suffered by victims, were marked by the conspicuous absence of victims from the actual proceedings.

The centrality and evolution of victims’ roles in the consolidation and expansion of the field of transitional justice should thus be understood in the light of several macro-level socio-legal dynamics which are discussed in the next section. These include the emergence of a universalising human rights discourse, which foregrounded the plight of victims of atrocity crimes, and which responded to victims’ mobilisation in different localities undergoing political transition. Following this overview, this Introduction reviews the current state of the scholarly debate regarding victim engagement in transitional justice. We then present the handbook’s analytical framework, which revolves around the notion of generations of victim engagement. Next, we reflect on how the evolution of victim engagement, along with other evolutions in the broader domain of transitional justice, has given rise to a complex ecosystem of intersecting justice struggles covering a wide range of issues; and what this means for how we, as researchers, practitioners, or policymakers, engage with victim-survivors and their justice struggles. Finally, we introduce the logic and structure of the handbook.

I.1 The Broader Socio-Legal Context

The developments and debates regarding victim engagement in the domain of transitional justice can be situated against the backdrop of several broader historical and political dynamics. We expand on five interrelated trends: evolutions in the international human rights architecture, the influence of regional human rights systems, the nexus between the formal human rights architecture and the (criminal justice) dimension of transitional justice, developments in the orbit of formal institutions, and broader societal trends.

First, with regards to the formal international human rights architecture, a number of connected trends that have unfolded since the early 2000s have contributed to the growing attention for rights-holders and victims of human rights violations. These include the establishment of the Human Rights Council in 2006 (replacing the Commission on Human Rights) and the consequent introduction of a Universal Periodic Review process, in which civil society and individuals are actively invited to submit information and to participate in the review process, granting them a direct role in the evaluation of a country’s human rights performance (O’Brien Reference O’Brien2022). Also the expansion of Special Procedures, such as Special Rapporteurs or United Nations (UN) Working Groups, has provided right-holders and victims of human rights violations with avenues to report on human rights abuses and seek redress (Nolan et al. Reference Nolan, Freedman and Murphy2017). Additionally, evolutions of the UN Treaty Bodies have furthered the attention for rights-holders and civil society. Here one can think of optional protocols that allow individuals to submit complaints directly to treaty bodies, or the involvement of civil society organisations in the development of their general comments and recommendations (Kissling Reference Kissling, Steffek, Kissling and Nanz2008; Nowak et al. Reference Nowak, Birk and Monina2019). This has been complemented with the recognition of specific victim groups (such as women and children, persons with disabilities, victims of trafficking and sexual violence), Indigenous Peoples, LGBTQI+ people, and accompanying provisions for their increased participation and consultation (Lundy Reference Lundy2007; Mégret Reference Mégret and Farrior2017).

Second, evolutions in regional human rights systems have reflected, consolidated and expanded these trends at the international level. The European Court of Human Rights, for example, implemented several elements aimed at accessibility and better handling of individual complaints, and issued landmark rulings advancing victims’ rights (van Dijk et al. Reference van Dijk, van Hoof, van Rijn and Zwaak2018). The Inter-American Human Rights System has been the most pro-active in terms of increasing its engagement with civil society and victims-survivors, and adopting a victim-oriented approach both in its proceedings and rulings. This is evident in landmark decisions by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (such as Barrios Altos v. Peru) which established ambitious legal standards, including the principle of transformative reparations, also reflected in their comprehensive advisory opinions (Uprimny Yepes Reference Uprimny Yepes2009). In addition, the work of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights – in the form of thematic reports, country visits, precautionary measures – considers the perspective of civil society and victims of human rights violations.

Third, growing attention for victims and their active role in justice processes is also rooted in evolutions at the nexus of human rights, criminal justice, and transitional justice itself. The very establishment of bodies such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions across the globe, have offered victims platforms to share their experiences (Hayner Reference Hayner2011). Similarly, the establishment of international criminal tribunals that incorporate provisions for victim participation, for example in the form of witness testimonies, have contributed to a more active understanding of victims’ roles in criminal justice processes (McGonigle Reference McGonigle2009). Both trends also reflect an increased recognition of victims’ rights in international law (and consequently in national legal systems). This is exemplified by the UN Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation (United Nations General Assembly 2005), outlining fundamental principles for the treatment of victims, such as access to justice, fair treatment, and redress. These principles have progressively been implemented and integrated into international, regional and national legal frameworks, with the Inter-American System also being a norm-leader in expanding victims’ rights. These evolutions have been accompanied by a growing acknowledgement of the potential of restorative justice, which has a stronger focus on victims and their communities in criminal justice approaches (McEvoy and Erickson Reference McEvoy, Erickson, Sullivan and Tifft2006).

Fourth, it is relevant to consider how evolutions beyond the formal human rights and justice architecture have shaped the growing attention for victims’ rights and engagement in justice processes. Here it is relevant to highlight the interplay between the previously mentioned evolution and civil society activism. On one hand, these evolutions may be read as a consequence of advocacy on the side of a broad coalition of civil society actors. On the other hand, increased opportunities for access and participation have fed a proliferation of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society organisations (CSOs) working on victims’ rights (Jochnick and Bickford Reference Jochnick, Bickford, Baumann-Pauly and Nolan2016). This has given rise to a dynamic landscape of organisations working in the domain of advocacy, legal representation, psycho-social support, awareness and education about victims’ rights, formal representation and consultation at the UN, to name a few. Related to this proliferation of victim (support) organisations, technological evolutions have enabled these actors to mobilise support, coordinate efforts, and raise awareness, sometimes globally, for specific struggles (Gregory Reference Gregory2023; Kingston and Stam Reference Kingston and Stam2013; Sorell Reference Sorell2015). These technological evolutions, and the avenues for enhanced collaboration they allow for, have also impacted the development of transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink Reference Keck and Sikkink1998). While professionalised NGOs have played a highly visible role in some of this work, the influence of grassroots organisations and social movements in shaping agendas should not be overlooked. Lastly, it is relevant to mention how growing attention for – the participation of – rights holders within the formal human rights system also came to shape approaches in neighbouring domains, as is exemplified in the mainstreaming of a human rights-based approach to development both within and beyond UN bodies (Vandenhole and Gready Reference Vandenhole and Gready2014).

Fifth, these trends emerged in a broader societal context that both shaped and reflected them. From the institutional reforms that have marked the wave of democratisation in the 1990s to extensive media coverage of human rights crisis and the plight of victims, and from growing attention for intersectional harm and inclusive advocacy to programmes envisioning the empowerment of historically marginalised groups, a cultural shift could be argued to have accompanied the aforementioned developments. Of particular importance here are the impact of technology and new media, which have, on the one hand, allowed for the emergence of an entirely new kind of digital activism that relies on social media for mobilising support and advocating human rights. On the other hand, there has been an expansion in the crowdsourcing of information as technology has increasingly allowed for both the collection and dissemination of information of human rights abuses (think, for example, of Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat, or Mnemonics). This has granted a protagonist role to victims in documenting (in real time) human rights violations (Fuller and Weizman Reference Fuller and Weizman2021).

I.2 How Transitional Justice Scholarship Has Studied the Roles of Victims

These evolutions constitute the background against which to understand the growing attention for victims’ evolving roles within the domain of transitional justice – both in scholarship and in practice. This attention for victims’ roles has meant that scholarship focusing on victim engagement in transitional justice has virtually become a sub-field in its own right. To date, however, an overarching analytical model for understanding how victims’ diverse roles have evolved over time and across contexts has been missing. Instead, it can be observed that several distinct strands of writing have come to characterise scholarship on the roles of victims in transitional justice, with limited exchanges taking place across these strands. In this section, we survey these strands based on an overview of existing scholarship.

A first strand of writing, which could be described as technical-legal in nature, focuses on examining and evaluating the opportunities for, modalities of, and challenges related to victim participation. It focuses therein on formal, institutionalised transitional justice processes. This strand of writing (implicitly or explicitly) subscribes to the value of both formal transitional justice mechanisms per se, as well as to the importance of victim participation therein (see, for example, Jasini and Phan Reference Jasini and Phan2011; Pena and Carayon Reference Pena and Carayon2013). Two trends can be identified. On one hand, empirical studies pertaining to this strand have investigated concrete practices and experiences of formal participation, underlining the importance of procedural justice, the dynamics of legal representation, or the barriers that victims face in accessing and participating in transitional justice processes (Byrne Reference Byrne2004; Cody et al. Reference Cody, Stover, Balthazard and Koenig2015; Stover et al. Reference Stover, Balthazard and Koenig2011). On the other hand, normative and legal-doctrinal literature within this strand of writing has focused on theorising and analysing the (expanding) rights and roles of victims in criminal proceedings, truth commissions, and reparation schemes (Doak Reference Doak2005; Van den Wyngaert Reference Van den Wyngaert2011). What unifies and characterises these studies is their focus on formal structures and the examination of victims’ roles as (individuated) rightsholders therein.

A second, and dominant, strand of writing is rooted in critical transitional justice scholarship and practice. Scholars and practitioners in this paradigm start from a broader critique of formal transitional justice and problematise the so-called ‘add victims and stir’ approach (Bjorkdahl and Selimovic Reference Bjorkdahl and Selimovic2015), whereby victims are simply integrated into existing processes without fundamentally altering these institutions and processes in terms of how they operate or what they should achieve. Within this critical strand too, we can find both empirical studies (de Waardt and Weber Reference de Waardt and Weber2019; McEvoy and McConnachie Reference McEvoy and McConnachie2013) as well as a number of theoretical, methodological, and normative propositions for scholarship and practice (Bundschuh Reference Bundschuh2015; Ottendörfer Reference Ottendörfer2018; Robins and Wilson Reference Robins and Wilson2015). A key characteristic of this strand is its emphasis on a more bottom-up and actor-oriented approach to victim participation in transitional justice. This perspective prioritises victims’ needs and agency, explicitly factors in dynamics and relations of power, and considers broader engagement spaces that include grassroots capacity-building, collective mobilisation, and community activism. This body of work also engages with de-colonial and post-colonial critiques of transitional justice (Madlingozi Reference Madlingozi2010; Mutua Reference Mutua2015; Park Reference Park2020), problematising the dominance of Western legal frameworks and networks of experts and expertise, which reflect and reinforce global hierarchies, while marginalising local and indigenous knowledge, practices, and agency. These studies interrogate the meaning-making and epistemologies of transitional justice, rooted in the liberal democratic foundational paradigm, and call for a radical re-politicisation of the field, one that centres survivors and local communities.

A last, more diffuse strand of writing engages with notions such as conscious non-participation, everyday resistance, ‘quiet’ transitional justice, or studies victim agency in the absence of any formal transitional justice process (Bernath Reference Bernath2018; Clark Reference Clark2020; Dempster Reference Dempster2020; Thomson Reference Thomson2011). It foregrounds victim agency ‘beyond participation’, by examining actions or non-actions that typically transcend conventional understandings of the repertoire of victim engagement in transitional justice. This strand gained prominence as the language and practice of transitional justice increasingly started to expand into contexts where no political transition took place or no peace agreements were signed, and where a formal or encompassing transitional justice process is therefore typically not in place. In such settings, transitional justice tends to be mobilised in more ad hoc and experimental ways, often by grassroots justice actors (Destrooper et al. Reference Destrooper, Gissel and Carlson2023). Like the second strand of writing, this literature tends to challenge dominant or mainstream perspectives on transitional justice, for example by critiquing the preoccupation with highly public, performative, and politicised forms of victim engagement, or by questioning the universal assumptions underpinning victims’ justice-seeking behaviours (such as their assumed desire to speak truth or to memorialise violence) (Almeida Reference Almeida2021; Kent Reference Kent2011; Kidron Reference Kidron2021). This literature is typically rooted in empirical case-bound research, but unlike the first and second strands, it is less unified by a common framework of assumptions or methodologies, drawing attention instead to divergent approaches to pursuing justice and redress.

These various strands of writing highlight significant differences in the study and practice of victim engagement in transitional justice. Yet, owing to their differing orientations and disciplinary roots, they have largely evolved in isolation of, or even in direct opposition to, one another. As a result, despite the depth and breadth of existing scholarship, exchanges across various strands of writing are rare. This means that there is currently no encompassing framework for reading these literatures alongside one another, for tracing the various trends that have shaped the field and what roles victims themselves have played in driving these trends, or for charting where we are heading next. Gaining a clearer understanding of these dynamics is crucial for researchers, victim groups, practitioners, and policymakers who are faced with an increasingly broad and diverse range of justice initiatives that are developed under the banner of transitional justice. Not only is there a proliferation of such initiatives in practice, but many of these initiatives also challenge the existing transitional justice paradigm, underlining the need to rethink and future-proof existing models of engagement. In the next section, we propose an analytical framework, rooted in the day-to-day practices of grassroots justice actors, to facilitate conversations about these topics across the boundaries of different strands of scholarship.

I.3 Generations of Victim Engagement and Intersecting Justice Struggles

As the contributions in this handbook set out to demonstrate, each of the aforementioned approaches to conceptualising and studying victim engagement in transitional justice has its merit. What the book also shows, however, is that each of these approaches typically has a different analytical focus, highlighting different spheres of engagement as well as varying forms of agency and intentionality. This explains the scarcity of conversations across these various strands of writing. Scholars exploring the modalities of victim participation in formal transitional justice institutions, for example, may not per se be concerned with individual or collective reasons for non-participation, and those examining grassroots justice mechanisms may have limited affinity with procedural impediments to a more far-reaching type of victim engagements in (semi-)judicial justice processes. Similarly, many critical scholars focus their critique on avenues for victim participation provided by formal institutions, and see those actions victims undertake in the orbit of, or even far away from, the formal transitional justice process as something conceptually different from transitional justice.

This handbook, however, shows that these are all dimensions of the broader justice ecosystems that victims navigate. In doing so, victims themselves often make no categorical distinction between various forums, modalities, or sites of justice, and their justice activism is often characterised by a more trajectorial approach to seeking justice (Evrard et al. Reference Evrard, Mejía Bonifazi and Destrooper2021). This means that they are often involved across various justice sites and processes, either sequentially or in parallel. This reality underlines the importance of having an analytical framework for victim activism that can capture actions and dynamics developing across these various types of forums. Yet, currently, a framework is missing to understand these different types of actions as part of a multi-faceted struggle for justice. This leads to an unnecessarily fragmented understanding of the justice-seeking efforts and trajectories of victims, who typically navigate multiple spaces, engage in a range of strategies, and operate across diverse timelines. One risk of the absence of a shared analytical framework for assessing the various dimensions of victim engagement is that of conceptual mismatch, which, in turn, hampers the emergence of a comprehensive understanding of victim engagement.

The framework developed in this Introduction and further substantiated throughout the empirical cases in the following chapters therefore proposes a thicker understanding of victim participation. In line with Firchow and Selim’s proposal (Reference Firchow and Selim2022), we will refer to this as ‘victim engagement’. This term recognises and accommodates the fluid and interconnected nature of victims’ actions across different contexts and modalities. The framework uses the concept of generations of victim engagement to distinguish between various types of roles victims have played throughout the lifecycle of transitional justice, tracing the development of victim engagement through three discernible generations: the grassroots activism of victims in the early days of transitional justice, the formalisation of victim participation in institutional processes, and the current phase characterised by diverse and resistance-based forms of engagement. This framework is based on a historical perspective that allows for a more encompassing outlook on what transitional justice is, as well as on how victims’ engagement with it has shaped the field.

At the same time, we argue these generational shifts do not follow a linear or successive trajectory in the strict sense. Rather, the concept of ‘generations’ operates as a heuristic device to trace how, over time, new opportunities, hindrances, and dynamics emerged that impacted victims’ roles in transitional justice, as well as the dominant scholarly lenses through which these roles have been analysed and critiqued. But the chapters will also show how, at present, different generational characteristics and forms of engagement often coexist both across and within distinct transitional justice contexts. In any given context, victim groups may be involved across a range of initiatives or spaces that could be interpreted as pertaining to various generations. Indeed, newly emerging modalities or spaces for action often do not render existing ones obsolete, but may be added on to existing action repertoires in ways that result in a dense justice ecosystem, shaped by and contributing to increasingly intersecting justice struggles. The dynamics characterising the different generations of victim engagement and their convergence within contemporary, intersecting justice struggles will serve as the central organising framework of this handbook.

A first important contribution of this framework to the literature is that it formally defies the idea that transitional justice started when (inter)national institutions became active in this realm. Instead, it takes as its starting point the activism of victims taking to the streets, for example in Chile and Argentina, to know the fate of their missing loved ones and to demand recognition and accountability. It refers to these victims’ mobilisation for justice after large-scale violence as the first generation of victim engagement in transitional justice. This conceptualisation stems from our concern that the currently dominant narrative that equates the beginning of transitional justice with the emergence of formal processes risks perpetuating the invisibility of victims’ agency, experimentation, and agenda-setting power, which were foundational to the emergence of what later became known as transitional justice. By acknowledging grassroots justice practices and demands developing in the immediate aftermath of violence, before any formal institutions are in place, as manifestations of transitional justice, we foreground the meaning-making power of grassroots justice actors and their formative importance on early transitional justice. Much of what is referred to as transitional justice today emerged in an ad hoc way, driven by grassroots actors, notably in Latin America, who were seeking truth and justice after military dictatorships (Rowen Reference Rowen2017). Acknowledging their impact on the emergence of the transitional justice paradigm (both historically and to this day), rather than identifying transitional justice’s institutionalisation or ‘boom’ in the late 1990s as the start of transitional justice, is more intellectually honest and acknowledges the agentic role of victims.

Tracing how this activism evolved shows that several demands resulted in the development of what today is typically referred to as the standardised transitional justice ‘toolkit’ (Gissel Reference Gissel2022). Others were taken forward in other informal or grassroots spaces and processes. While there is a thriving literature critiquing the so-called formalisation and standardisation of transitional justice (Sharp Reference Sharp2019; Turner Reference Turner, Lawther, Moffett and Jacobs2017), the importance of some degree of institutionalisation can hardly be overestimated: the official truth commissions, criminal proceedings, reparations programmes, and institutional reforms that were installed in countries across the globe carried with them a promise of democratisation, non-recurrence, and sustainable peace, but also entailed a formal acknowledgement of the harm that had happened. These mechanisms created highly visible platforms for victims to share their stories, seek (state) accountability, and commemorate loved ones, embedding victims’ rights and experiences within state-led transitional justice processes. At the same time, this institutionalisation and formalisation initially side-lined and invisibilised some of the victims’ own initiatives, demands, and realities. Even when avenues for victim participation were developed in these formal mechanisms, this participation often failed to meet the expectations of various actors involved, and raised concerns regarding the instrumentalisation or marginalisation of victims’ multi-faceted experiences and stories. The handbook refers to this opening of participation avenues in formal transitional justice mechanisms as the second generation of victim engagement in transitional justice. The opportunities and shortcomings of this specific generation has been the focus of much of the scholarship mentioned in the previous section, notably the legal-technical and the critical strands.

Most recently, a third generation of victim engagement has been shaping up. It emerged partly in response to a new set of societal challenges (not limited to political transitions) and partly in response to (the shortcomings of) the second generation of victim engagement. Across the globe, victims of a wide range of injustices are invoking, innovating, and experimenting with the transitional justice paradigm in response to state-led violence, the (re-)emergence of authoritarianism, colonial and slavery legacies, extractivism or environmental harm, racial discrimination, and other forms of historical and contemporary rights violations. Their actions echo the protagonism and agenda-setting power of the first generation of victim engagement, similarly shaped by experimentation and adaptation to context. Yet they differ in that, within this third generation, the element of resistance is central (Jones and Bernath Reference Jones and Bernath2017) – not just in terms of using transitional justice to resist violence or a harmful status quo, but also in terms of resisting the injustice inherent in a narrow and exclusionary understanding of what victim engagement in transitional justice is. This resistance encompasses a spectrum of agency and subjectivities and necessitates a fundamental re-imagining of how we understand victim engagement in transitional justice, pushing the boundaries of which actors, practices, and struggles are considered worthy of attention. At the same time, as the chapters (10–14) discussing this third generation of victim engagement show, not all resistance is highly vocal or visible, nor is it necessarily progressive.

The chapters in this book will not only elaborate on the characteristics and modalities of each of these generations, thereby further substantiating this analytical framework. They will also point to the potential coexistence of various generations within one context, and, in doing so, illustrate how the different generations of participation may have emerged at various points in time, but should not be understood as linearly successive. There are, for example, no indications that victims’ active engagement in informal processes lessened when avenues for formal participation became available. Neither has formal institutions’ attention for victim participation seemingly waned because of the current boom in transitional justice initiatives on the side of civil society organisations. We thus use the notion of generations to mark the emergence of certain types of activism at a certain point in time in a given context, rather than to imply that we have decisively moved on from the one generation to the next. As the chapters will show, while initiatives pertaining to various generations may emerge at different points in time, they typically coexist at present. This generational framework has the potential to foster a deeper insight into why and when certain kinds of engagement emerge and how they evolve. It also allows for a closer examination of the dynamics and intersections between the various types of victim engagement that emerged over time. Such a model, moreover, helps to understand why, in spite of the prominence of critical transitional justice scholarship, the practice of transitional justice is expanding, including to aparadigmatic contexts and often at the initiative of victims themselves (Destrooper et al. Reference Destrooper, Gissel and Carlson2023).

Both the identification of a third generation of victim engagement that revolves around resistance, as well as the acknowledgement of the coexistence of various kinds of activism pertaining to different generations, moreover, brings to the fore the intersection of various justice struggles in which victims are typically involved and the existence of a dynamic justice ecosystem. For the purpose of this handbook, then, the notion of an ecosystem does not only encompass the manifold justice avenues that victims of gross human rights violations and atrocities crimes pursue to address violent legacies. It also reflects the reality on the ground in which these struggles are increasingly intertwined with other kinds of justice efforts. This means that, on the one hand, the practice and rhetoric of transitional justice are increasingly mobilised in a range of struggles that do not explicitly focus on the direct legacies of authoritarianism or conflict. On the other hand, it also means that an increasingly wide range of injustices are brought into more paradigmatic transitional justice processes (see, for example, Paricio Montesinos, Chapter 17, and Ibrahim et al., Chapter 15). The migration of transitional justice to aparadigmatic contexts and the expansion of its scope in established ones necessitate an acknowledgement of the increasingly porous borders between transitional justice and other justice movements as well as victim-protagonists’ critical role in installing and shaping this diverse range of intersecting justice processes. The case studies in the second part of this book demonstrate how these intersecting struggles mark contemporary transitional justice practice, and point to several interrelated dynamics rooted in, and emerging from, these intersecting justice struggles that are likely to characterise the future of transitional justice practice and scholarship.

In the first place, the (explicit or implicit) prominence of resistance in these struggles reconnects transitional justice to its radical roots, where victims’ demands were from the outset a call for disruption. While critical scholarship has documented how institutional approaches sanitised these demands, they persist and are regaining prominence (see, for example, Moffett, Chapter 10, and Robins and Bhandari, Chapter 12) – not only to challenge acute violence, but also to resist modes of participation that obscure lived realities, institutional inaction, structural violence, or emerging threats such as anti-rights discourse and democratic backsliding. Moreover, the increasingly intersecting nature of diverse justice struggles highlights how transitional justice is being mobilised alongside, and as a complement to, other justice frameworks, including social justice, human rights, and decolonisation efforts. The chapters show how each of these justice frameworks has its own action repertoire, and how this means that also action repertoires are increasingly mixing under the banner of transitional justice.

This results in a much more complex portrait of what engagement in (transitional) justice struggles looks like, but also of how the complexity of this ecosystem requires us to adopt a more fine-grained approach to thinking about the enabling and constraining effects that various types of actions in the formal and informal realm may have upon one another. Both the complexity and the nature of these intersecting justice struggles make it blatantly clear that current ways of engaging (whether as researchers, practitioners, or policymakers) need to be revisited. Studying victim engagement requires epistemological and methodological pluralism, grounded in a strong ethical commitment to how we research and accompany victim protagonism – including (self-)reflexivity around power dynamics, representation, and positionality. Contributors to this handbook, both implicitly and explicitly, offer handles to guide this reflexivity in research and practice. They emphasise the need to understand and recognise complex intersectional identities, respect diverse justice needs and perspectives, and centre approaches that view victims as agenda-setters and knowledge-holders. Several chapters outline deeply participatory and co-creative methodologies, or offer frameworks for engagement rooted in relationality, trust, mutual recognition, and an ethics of care. Across all contributions, there is a shared commitment to prioritising the safety, dignity, and agency of victim-survivors as central to both transitional justice processes and research.

I.4 Outline of the Book

The handbook is divided into two parts, each consisting of empirical case studies from across the globe. The chapters in Part I examine and unpack the dynamics of the different generations of transitional justice. They illustrate how these generations emerged at various points in time and how this shaped their modalities, logic, and aspirations, but also the effect on the afterlives of these ‘generations’ and how modalities of each generation eventually mix in practice. In doing so, these chapters substantiate the analytical framework proposed in this introduction. The chapters in Part II focus on the current state of practice, highlighting how the coexistence of different modes of victim engagement in intersecting justice struggles challenge the boundaries of transitional justice and push new topics to the centre of the debate. This exploration extends to questions about the implications for how, as researchers and practitioners, we engage in ways that acknowledge victims’ protagonism and agenda-setting agency.

Within the first part of the book, three sections cover the dynamics of the three generations. Focusing on the first generation of victim engagement, Mauricio Carrasco and Cath Collins trace victims’ self-advocacy and the active (co)-creation of initiatives on disappearance in Chile. They show how, over time, different forms of engagement have appeared but also how justice breakthroughs from 1998 were victim-driven, not state-designed. They highlight the protagonism of victims in bringing about state-led initiatives, rather than focusing only on what happens when victims then ‘participate’ in these formal mechanisms. In the next chapter, Cheryl Lawther zooms in on Northern Ireland to examine how victim groups can act as moral communities and exercise agency by using their own experiences to leverage change either by demanding a response from government or by installing a range of bottom-up initiatives. Thorsten Bonacker also considers the Northern Irish context, comparing it with Guatemala and Timor Leste to examine how the nature of prior conflicts, including their causes and resolutions, affect both institutional strategies of and decisions on reparations for certain victim groups. In the last chapter illustrating dynamics of the first generation of victim engagement, Güneş Daşlı explores political agency in the context of the Saturday Mothers, the organised relatives of the disappeared in Turkey. She uses the prism of relationality to examine how collective mobilisation can be used to create spaces for imagining different forms of justice and to experiment with action repertoires, even when there is not yet a transitional justice process in place. Jointly these four chapters paint a picture of victim engagement across a range of cases where formal transitional justice was or is not (yet) in place, and where victims are the protagonists in pushing for some form of process to be installed and for justice demands to stay on the social and political agenda.

A second set of chapters focuses on the second generation of engagement in transitional justice. Mina Rauschenbach and Briony Jones draw on their work with families of the forcibly disappeared in Colombia and El Salvador to examine how families navigate their engagement as justice stakeholders within judicial and state-based mechanisms and what types of institutional responses are needed to ensure effective and victim-oriented search processes. Moving beyond this focus on procedural justice, the chapter by Thomes Obel Hansen presents a more sweeping critique of how in Uganda’s Transitional Justice Policy, formal ‘compliance’ with ideas about civil society and victim participation, as endorsed by international standards and guidelines about transitional justice, did not result in an outcome that met the expectations and demands of most local civil society and victim groups. Taking a more solution-oriented approach, Miracle Chinwenmeri Uche explores how the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor’s first Policy on Complementarity and Cooperation, published in Spring 2024, may deliver on the promise of partnership and bringing justice closer to victims. She notably considers whether this new policy may spark victims’ interests in other – formal or informal – avenues for redress. In her chapter on Cambodia, Fangyi Li starts from victims’ initial justice mobilisation and explores ways of overcoming the risk of big formal initiatives, such as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, pushing alternative justice strategies off the radar. Also, Brianne McGonigle Leyh’s work on the US, an aparadigmatic case of transitional justice, addresses the inclusion of various justice repertoires and actors in formal initiatives in the domain of truth, in order to have deeper engagement with and impact among affected communities. Together these five chapters offer a better understanding of key dynamics regarding victims’ participation in formal transitional justice mechanisms, as well as proposing ways forward.

The last set of chapters in Part I look at the third generation of engagement, exploring various types of resistance and re-imagining. The chapter by Luke Moffett explores the place of victims resisting the narratives of the State, coercive tactics, and violence against them, in their claims for reparations. It also reflects on the impact of this resistance on victims whose activism can take years, decades, even generations. Through a more micro-level analysis of memoir, the chapter of Lauren Dempster and Kevin Hearty then explores how, in the absence of (access to) formal transitional justice mechanisms, resistance may also lead victims towards other spaces and formats where they can engage in truth practices and narrate their experiences of violence on their own terms. Referring to this as ‘quiet’ transitional justice, the authors expand the transitional justice imagination far beyond formal mechanisms. Simon Robins and Ram Kumar Bhandari draw on their research with families of the missing in Nepal to demonstrate how both families of the missing’s initial mobilisation and their representation in national transitional justice processes intersect with broader forms of resistance both against exclusionary dynamics of these formal processes and against discriminatory trends more broadly. Through a focus on more collective initiatives, Daniela Suárez Vargas examines the ways in which social movements in Colombia wield the political dimension of victimhood as a tool to resist further victimisation, notably in the struggles regarding conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence. In her chapter on the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms in Sri Lanka, Chulani Kodikara uses the concept of ‘archives of desire’ to examine whether victims’ demand for more formalisation and internationalisation should be taken at face value as a belief in that standardised transitional justice toolkit or instead points towards an underlying dissatisfaction with and resistance against the non-action of national-level institutions. Read alongside one another, these chapters illustrate how various types of resistance have given rise to multiple and innovative initiatives that defy the original moorings of the transitional justice paradigm.

Part II of the handbook explores how this has affected the practice of transitional justice today. A first set of chapters traces several intersecting justice struggles, highlighting both instances where transitional justice is invoked in aparadigmatic justice struggles, as well as instances where new issues and debates are foregrounded in more paradigmatic struggles. The first of these chapters, by Mina Ibrahim, Maria Hartmann, and Susanne Buckley-Zistel, examines how the mobilisation of the transitional justice paradigm by Syrian diaspora constitutes both an aparadigmatic case, but in concreto also leads to the interweaving of various struggles, as Syrian diaspora justice actors connect their justice efforts with injustices of living in Germany today – including their status as migrants/refugees. Also Kim Baudewijns’ work on the DRC, explores this dual dynamic: on the one hand she describes a non-transitional context in which the transitional justice discourse is mobilised, on the other hand she underlines how a range of justice actors tap into transitional justice language not only with regards to political violence, but also to frame struggles on, for example, youth and democratic participation or environmental harm. In a chapter on Colombia, Marta Paricio Montesinos discusses Colombians’ struggle to hold corporations accountable, and argues that victims play a crucial role in pushing for a more encompassing understanding of transitional justice by complementing the initial struggle with new dimensions as they press for the accountability of private economic actors. Taken together, these chapters illustrate how porous the borders of transitional justice have become.

The next set of chapters starts to address some questions regarding how to understand, analyse and ‘do’ transitional justice in these dynamic and rapidly changing contexts. First, Pamina Firchow and Lisa Laplante set out to develop a theoretical framework that can guide the development and evaluation of participatory reparations programmes. The chapter builds on notions of relational justice to provide both an instrumental and legal justification for inclusive processes in the design, implementation, and evaluation of reparations programmes. The next three chapters foreground innovative methodological proposals regarding how to intervene, both as practitioners and as researchers in this complex and multi-layered context. Huma Saeed’s chapter about Afghanistan foregrounds intervention methods rooted in the ‘theatre of the oppressed’ as a means to understand and appraise multi-faceted justice struggles in the absence of formal transitional justice mechanisms. The chapter by Adriana Alas, Amanda Grzyb, and María Helia Rivera Castillo introduces the profoundly co-creative Surviving Memory project in El Salvador and its contribution to the creation of spaces to promote intergenerational and cross-sector dialogue, and post-war recovery. In the last chapter, Michael Reed-Hurtado examines how, despite many challenges, grassroots actors in Latin America have been experimenting with new technologies, leading to new forms of engagement and novel claims. This set of chapters is only a starting point, but an important one, to re-think how to engage in this increasingly complex justice landscape where transitional justice is one node in a vast and porous justice ecosystem.

While this handbook does not endeavour to offer encompassing answers to definitional questions about what transitional justice today is, what its boundaries are, or what the ideal role of victims is or should be, these chapters offer a framework for understanding how victims have shaped the evolution of the field and continue to shape it, and how adopting an actor-oriented approach can guide our efforts at future-proofing transitional justice scholarship and practice.