What Counts as Transitional Justice Scholarship? Citational Recognition and Disciplinary Hierarchies in Theory and Practice

Abstract

Since its emergence as a field of scholarship and practice, transitional justice has coalesced around a set of mechanisms to deal with a legacy of violence. The “pull” toward mechanisms, institutions, and structures as a means of delivering justice has led to certain kinds of knowledge being recognized as “transitional justice research” in the mainstream. Drawing on the theory of epistemic positioning, we reveal how hierarchies of academic knowledge and the dominant “ways of knowing” in and of transitional justice are created. Through citation analysis, we reveal an emerging canon, a central body of valuable and seemingly “inevitable” knowledge of transitional justice consisting primarily of structure and outcome-oriented inquiries in the disciplines of politics, international relations, and law and consolidating a standardized model of how to “do” transitional justice. We argue that this canonization comes at the expenses of alternative approaches that challenge the core assumptions of the field. Inquiries that prioritize agency or process and reimagine what transitional justice could be remain bounded to their disciplines and subfields. We demonstrate how certain anxieties about the survival of the field result in policing of the boundaries of the field, creating hierarchies of “valuable” knowledge, and resisting the “decolonizing” impulse.