Towards Decolonial Agenda for Transitional Justice: “The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born”

It is argued that transitional justice is more culturally sensitive than its international human rights law counterpart. It is so due to the prominent role played by social movements in transitions and the relatively recent emergence of the field from what would be considered transitions in the ‘Global South’. Moreover, individuals and civil society arguably play a greater role in norm creation in transitional justice than in international law. Nevertheless, the impact of coloniality and colonialism on societies reckoning with the past received only marginal attention in transitional justice practice and scholarship. Although critical approaches to transitional justice address the shortcomings of paradigmatic transitions to peace and liberal democracies, they fail to address the harm caused by colonialism, post-colonialism, and coloniality. When transitional justice is reluctant to engage with the decolonial agenda, it risks becoming complicit in promulgating colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial dynamics. Transitional justice’s agenda should engage in the issues of decolonisation where decolonisation is viewed as a commitment that informs the practice and scholarship on all levels rather than looking at postcolonial situation symptomatically. To outline the state of the problem and suggest practical solutions, the chapter first examines why transitional justice needs a decolonial agenda. The chapter outlines suggestions of what could be done for the field to be decolonised. It argues that decoloniality should not be a metaphor (Tuck and Yang 2012) but a commitment to rethink the tenants of transitional justice and question its epistemic roots where modernity (understood as a Western enlightenment model) is taken as a baseline. The chapter makes a case for more radical alternative futures for transitional justice, enshrined in the tenants of decolonial theory.