Eric Hoddy, IGDC Member and Lecturer at the Center for Applied Human Rights, presents a new edited volume, Transformative justice and agrarian conflict: Elements for a necessary debate.
This book project was conceived for introducing and gathering some initial reflections on the global debate on transformative justice and its relationship to agrarian conflict and change.
Published in Spanish with Santo Tomás University, Medellín, Colombia, the book discusses these questions through a series of interventions by the editors and by academics and practitioners based in Colombia. It focuses on the Colombian conflict, where, despite the peace process, the country is witnessing the reactivation of armed conflict.
In some regions, violence and conflict have returned with a vengeance; in others they never left, and elsewhere, new forms of violence and dispossession are emerging in the post-demobilization setting. The book discusses the ideas and prospects of transformative agrarian justice, the intersections between agrarian inequality, structural and systemic violence, and peacebuilding through a transformation lens.
In Chapter 1, José Gutiérrez and I introduce the global debate on transformative justice and discuss its significance in relation to agrarian conflict and change. We identify four key trends that might characterize the rural or agrarian settings for justice:
1) Peasants and other people living and working in rural areas remain exposed to direct and structural and systemic forms of non-war violence.
2) Transitional and post-conflict settings may be sites of deep grievances and protests that are rooted in political economy.
3) Post-conflict settings may have large numbers of rural victims where violence has sprung from issues around access and control of land, labor and financial capital.
4) Rural grievances and social conflict are helping fuel the global rise of authoritarian populism.
Gutiérrez and I reflect on how a more transformative practice might operate in contexts characterized by such trends and in the Colombian context in particular. We drew on the work of the Pastoral Land Commission in rural Brazil for insight into the methods and practices through which transformative justice might be sought after.
In Chapter 2, Dáire McGill presents the ‘structural violence matrix’ as a methodological tool for identifying the transformative potential of community initiatives and policies.
McGill discusses how the notion of structural violence has been treated in global debates in transitional justice and applies the matrix to a case of the Peasant Reserve Zones in Colombia. His results suggest a mixed picture – that while the Peasant Reserve Zones guarantee land access and stimulate rural development there is yet to emerge a substantial transformation in structures of tenure and ownership.
Looking ahead, McGill argues that integrating the Peasant Reserve Zones with other forms of peasant activism is perhaps where the greatest potential for transformation lies. The chapter demonstrates how local transformative justice and careful application of the law can influence the reduction of structural violence and the transformation of institutions.
Chapters 3-5 provide a series of shorter critical comments on the ideas set out by the editors. In Chapter 3, Rocío Del Pilar Peña Huertas (Assistant Professor, Rosario University, Colombia and Deputy Director of the Land Observatory) reflects positively on the value of transformative justice amidst growing recognition of the limits of transitional justice mechanisms in Colombia.
She indicates how such discussions create new opportunities for investigating social problems, how institutions are designed and evaluating public policies that impact the countryside. Rocío Del Pilar Peña Huertas highlights, however, the need for researchers to further develop the current repertoire of methodological tools for the evaluation of public policies and structural violence.
In Chapter 4, Irene Vélez-Torres (Minister for Mining and Energy in the Government of Colombia) provides reflections on the value of environmental perspective on transformative justice. She argues this perspective is needed both for producing a comprehensive and sustainable vision for rural justice and for responding to local and global socioecological crises more broadly. Transformative justice, she suggests, must feature as a component within transdisciplinary and multiscalar responses to socioecological crises that can “contribute decisively to peace and people’s well-being.”
In Chapter 5, Diana Marcela Muriel Forero (activist, feminist, and lawyer with the Colombian Commission of Jurists) provides a commentary on several key themes: the theoretical approach to transformative justice and restorative justice, general criteria specific to transformative justice, the particularities of transformative justice in the Colombian context and proposed methodologies. She argues that transformative justice must not lose sight of Colombia’s colonial reality, and that approaching structural violence requires “going back in history to unmask the germ of colonization and patriarchy” and to focus on cultural and symbolic processes.
Transformative justice is a relatively new agenda, with much of the discussion on the topic still residing in the academic institutions in the Global North. This volume, which arises through Santo Tomás University’s ‘New Trends in International Law’ seminar series, represents one of the first with Colombian researchers and practitioners that seeks to contextualize and discuss transformative justice in relation to agrarian questions, land and inequality in Colombia – a theme that many Global North transitional justice donors won’t fund ( we thank Ruben Carranza for this observation).
The chapters underscore the value of such discussions to the Colombian context, as María Isabel Cuartas Giraldo (Santo Tomás University) sets out in her summary of the volume: as an invitation to transcend the legal, institutional and temporal limits of transitional justice and of proposing concrete steps towards the social practice of transformative justice in this setting, where participation and opportunities for rural mobilization confront many challenges.