In this analytical essay, we situate truth commissions as relevant sites for International Relations (IR) research, in particular on professional communities and knowledge hierarchies. With an empirical focus on report-making, we argue that there is a need to rethink and revise established professional community concepts. While these concepts stress professional communities’ detachment from mundane pressures, we suggest a “pressure lens” to better grasp the key dynamics of expert knowledge production. Based on in-depth interpretive research on three truth commissions—in Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Tunisia—we set out to identify key dynamics in the report-making of truth commissions that contribute to the gap between high expectations and sobering realities regarding truth commissions as “victim-centred” policy instruments. Understanding the dynamics at play requires us to pay attention to unequal pressures—such as time and funding pressures, powerholder interference, and demands voiced by victims and survivors—that bear on the work of experts and professionals who produce truth commission reports. We argue that these pressures and, crucially, the ways in which they tend to play out under conditions of coloniality, are expressions of global hierarchies that shape professional report-making work.

This text analyzes the trials conducted by the US against representatives of German industry after World War II. Contrary to the existing literature in the fields of transitional justice and corporate accountability, the article takes an analytical approach and focuses on the economic-political ideas of order that underlie the proceedings. To this end, the analysis focuses on the concepts used in the judgments to assemble the evidence and materials into images of the violent past. Through a detailed reading of the legal reasoning regarding the charges of “war of aggression”, “slave labor” and “plunder” the text shows that judges project the liberal separation of state and economy onto the past as a normative positing, finding unlawful behavior by entrepreneurs where the totalitarian state violates the freedom of the economic sphere. Similar to ordoliberal theorizing, the trials locate the causes of violence associated with the corporations in the totalitarian state and, conversely, posit the free market economy as the guarantor of a democratic post-war order. The text concludes with reflections on the implications of this observation for current efforts to counter violence in the context of transnational accumulation processes by establishing human rights obligations for corporations.

Abstract: In peace and conflict research, processual understandings function as alternatives to too narrow and too broad concepts of peace. Instead of understanding peace as a substantial condition, for example defined by the absence of violence or the realization of social justice, processual understandings focus on change from war to peace. However, it often remains unclear what it actually means to understand peace as a process. In this contribution, we aim to work out the theoretical value of a processual understanding of peace. We therefore look at processual understandings of change and at how peace as a process can be shaped in practice. We argue that peace as a process is more than the reduction of violence as directed change. Peace processes can also go along with a transformation of violence, and not only with its reduction. A processual understanding of peace hence considers unintended consequences and resulting non-linearity of peace.

In 2018, peasant farmers of the Ariari region of Colombia protested against “Colombia Siembra,” an agricultural development policy implemented by the Colombian government between 2015 and 2018 to increase the country’s agricultural productivity. Within the framework of this policy, bureaucratic zonings based on the land’s productive suitability were used as conditions for farmers to access publicly funded support for loans. This process had adverse repercussions on the living spaces of agricultural producers, as it perpetuated and sophisticated state policies that have resulted in their eternal indebtedness. This paper examines land-use planning, indebtedness, and agricultural development from a critical perspective of policy interventions affecting landscapes. Based on a situated analysis of the Ariari region in Colombia and the experience of the small- and medium-scale farmers who live there, this paper highlights the construction of land use as a violent process with major consequences on life, land, and socioecological relationalities.

Ziviler Ungehorsam ist aktuell wieder en vogue – ebenso wie seine Erforschung. In der breiteren Öffentlichkeit wie in sozialwissenschaftlichen Fachkreisen wird, insbesondere vor dem Hintergrund der Straßenblockaden und direkten Aktionen von Gruppen wie Letzte Generation oder Just Stop Oil mittlerweile sehr kontrovers die Frage diskutiert, ob es sich dabei um zivilen Ungehorsam handelt; wann Protest überhaupt legitim ist; wo die Grenzen des gerechtfertigten politischen Ausdrucks in der Demokratie verlaufen; und wie es dabei um das Verhältnis zu Gewalt steht. Den unterschiedlichen Antworten, die politische Vordenker*innen im Laufe der Zeit auf diese Fragen formuliert haben und ihrer Relevanz für die Gegenwart widmet sich Prof. Dr. Christian Volk am Lehrstuhl für Theorie der Politik am Institut für Sozialwissenschaften der Humboldt-Universität. Dr. Jannis Grimm vom Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Friedens- und Konfliktforschung der Freien Universität hat sich mit ihm zu diesem Grenzbegriff unserer politischen Sprache ausgetauscht.

How can disruption and violence condition protest success, and how can they be legitimized? Where does civil disobedience end and radical protest begin? Potential answers to these controversial questions, as well as attempts at defining the concept of violence, are tied to ontological, normative, and epistemological presuppositions that shape the positionality of those providing those answers. This introduction takes stock of recent empirical and theoretical debates on the (non)violence-resistance-nexus to argue that attempts at objectively determining essentially political concepts are futile if they remain decoupled from the empirical and normative contexts that produce them. Consequently, we highlight several ways how scholars investigating violent phenomena and their social, temporal, relational, and discursive embedding may position themselves vis-à-vis their object of study, in an attempt to move the fragmented debate on (non)violence in the context of social mobilization towards a more situated and differentiated discussion.

Unrest and violence in urban space repeatedly represent projection surfaces for discursive escalations and political interpretive dominances. With Stuart Hall, they can be understood as conjunctures in which situational events and media-discursive interpretive struggles are embedded in a larger negotiation structure. The analysis of hegemonic and oppositional codes of events opens up this contested space. In the following, the so-called Krawallnächte in Stuttgart and Frankfurt in the summer of 2020 will be used as an example to trace this space through conjunctural analysis. It becomes apparent that the oppositional reading challenges and repoliticizes the securitizing and racializing/culturalizing strategies of the hegemonic narrative. The strategies that both codes use are presented in this article.

Fast sechs Jahre nach G20 ist die juristische Aufarbeitung der gewaltvollen Ausschreitungen während des Gipfelreffens noch immer nicht abgeschlossen. Vor unterschiedlichen Gerichten wird weiterhin über die Grenzen versammlungsrechtlich geschützter Proteste und rechtlich sanktionierter Polizeigewalt gerungen. Die Hamburger Anwält*innen Ulrike Donat, Martin Klingner und Dieter Magsam führen eine Vielzahl der Verfahren. Mit der Politik- und Rechtswissenschaftlerin Hannah Franzki sprechen sie über die rechtspolitischen Dimensionen der juristischen Auseinandersetzungen, die Grenzen der rechtlichen Einhegung von Polizeigewalt bei politischen Großereignissen, juristische Möglichkeiten den Raum für Protest zu schützen sowie über die Notwendigkeit einer gesellschaftlichen Diskussion über die Rolle der Polizei in der Bundesrepublik. Das Gespräch wurde am 2. Februar 2023 in Hamburg geführt.

The article contributes to literature that critically scrutinizes knowledge production and transfer in conflict and intervention contexts. Drawing on original research on the Tunisian transitional justice process, it contributes an empirically grounded picture to the study of co-production of governance orders and security knowledges through transnational assemblages. These transnational assemblages are formed by complex coalitions of actors from the Global North and South, and the socio-material context they operate in. The article shows how security knowledge is produced, channelled, and steered into confined knowledge flows as transitional justice processes unfold. It then shows the ambivalent nature and different qualities of confined knowledge flows as they may be enabling and limiting, exclusionary and protective, and implicated with power relations. By doing so, it contributes to the understanding of how the (neo-)liberal politics of transitional justice are reproduced.

Aktuelle Ereignisse wie die Räumung des Nordrhein-Westfälischen Dorfes Lützerath, aber auch die Debatte um den Widerstand der Ukraine gegen den völkerrechtswidrigen Angriffskrieg Russlands, rücken den Blick auf die Ausübung von Widerstand, Protest und (Polizei)Gewalt und werfen die Frage danach auf, was Gewalt (und Gewaltfreiheit) eigentlich ausmacht, wer sie ausübt und wann und durch wen sie legitim ist. Angesichts dieses Kontexts untersuchen die Beiträge in diesem Heft unterschiedliche Untersuchungsgegenstände und Konfliktfelder, vom Streit über die direkten Aktionen und Straßenblockaden der Klimabewegung, zum fortwährenden revolutionären Momentum im Iran, über die Debatten um die „Krawallnächte“ in deutschen Großstädten. Dabei soll gezeigt werden, dass eine essenzielle Definition von Gewalt und Gewaltfreiheit unabhängig von Kontext, Positionalität und normativer Situierung empirisch wie konzeptionell nicht möglich ist. Es wird nicht der Anspruch erhoben, das Forschungsfeld in seiner Allgemeinheit einzufangen und endgültige Antworten auf die gestellten Fragen zu finden. Vielmehr wird die aktuelle Ausformung des Forschungsfeldes umrissen und ein differenzierter Blick auf den Nexus „Gewalt-Widerstand-Legitimität“ geworfen.

COVID-19 has markedly impacted the ways we collect research data through field research. As previously discussed in QMMR (MacLean et al. 2021) and elsewhere (e.g., GPPi 2021; ARC Bibliography 2021; SSRC 2020), the pandemic interrupted data collection and knowledge production routines. By restricting travel and free movement, thus impeding face-to-face exchanges, the pandemic and subsequent containment measures affected social scientists and their workflows, in particular those who previously relied on field-based methods. After all, interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, focus groups, and participant observation usually imply the physical co-presence of researchers and their participants, and often build on relations of trust that are established through repeated interpersonal contact. But quarantines, travel restrictions, lockdowns, social distancing, and even masks have made organizing personal encounters and maintaining and preserving dependable relations of trust with research participants harder—let alone establishing contact with and meeting new interlocutors.

The article proposes a heuristic framework based on processual sociology to analyse policy interventions aimed at change within conflict contexts. Such a framework is valuable because it creates an opportunity for a more open approach to empirical research that may allow us to research evolving processes and to see things we might miss otherwise. The article aims to complement goal-oriented and predominantly relational approaches and to contribute to debates that warn against the reification of actors and structures in research. It also points to a lack of attention to politics in the analysis of policy interventions. The argument derives from a discussion of transitional justice and peacebuilding and is empirically illustrated for the context of the Tunisian transitional justice process.

This article shows that for post-revolutionary Tunisia, a holistic approach to transitional justice – which aims to address a wide range of justice issues through a combination of measures – may lead to an expansion of mandates and consequently, to the overloading of transitional justice institutions. It therefore identifies a ‘problem-capacity-nexus’: While the expansive approach appears well-suited to relevant problems and the capacities of transitional justice professionals, it does not necessarily fit with the capacities of domestic institutions. Thus, transitional justice, while making efforts to address a broad range of relevant problems, has yet to find suitable avenues for actually doing so.

Since the military overthrow of President Mursi in mid-2013, Egypt has witnessed an authoritarian rollback. Through a combination of repression and nationalist securitizing discourses, popular pressure for reform was successfully channelled into a state-centric model of governance. But despite state violence and the restriction of public spaces, protests have anything but ceased. Contested Legitimacies explores this resilience of protest despite unprecedented repression through an approach attuned to the physical and discursive interactions among key players in Egypt’s post-revolutionary arena. Starting with the successful Tamarod uprising against President Mursi, to the unsuccessful Islamist resistance against the military coup, to the Rabaa massacre and the shrinking spaces for protest under Al-Sisi’s authoritarian rule, to the resurgence of popular resistance in the shape the Tiran and Sanafir island campaign, it investigates the rise and fall of different coalitions of contenders and explores their impact on Egypt’s political transition.

Transitional justice in process is the first book to comprehensively study the Tunisian transitional justice process. After the fall of the Ben Ali regime in 2011, Tunisia swiftly began dealing with its authoritarian past and initiated a comprehensive transitional justice process, with the Truth and Dignity Commission as its central institution. However, instead of bringing about peace and justice, transitional justice soon became an arena of contention. Through a process lens, the book explores why and how the transitional justice process evolved, and explains how it relates to the country's political transition. Based on extensive field research in Tunisia and the United States, and interviews with a broad range of Tunisian and international stakeholders and decision-makers, Transitional justice in process provides an in-depth analysis of a crucial period, beginning with the first initiatives aimed at dealing with the past and seeking justice and accountability. It discusses the development and design of the transitional justice mandate, and looks at the performance of transitional justice institutions in practice. It examines the role of international justice professionals in different stages of the process, as well as the alliances and frictions between different actor groups that cut across the often-assumed local-international divide. Transitional justice in process makes an essential contribution to literature on the domestic and international politics of transitional justice, and in particular to the understanding of the Tunisian transitional justice process.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 beginning in early 2020 caused global disruption. As the risk of infection rose and public health authorities around the world enacted measures to contain the virus, everyday life ground to a halt. Activities that seemed routine in late 2019 became fraught with uncertainty. Fieldwork was no exception. Most field researchers had to change or cancel at least some of their plans; some left their field in a hurry before travel was shut down while others had to lock down on site; most academic institutions restricted travel, with some even prohibiting all forms of international movement. In brief, many traditional forms of fieldwork became all but impossible during the pandemic.

Scholarship has often compartmentalised issues associated with injustice, political violence, and past wrongdoings. To contextualise questions of political change and justice across time and space, we introduce a dynamic, layered and transversal understanding of these processes. Drawing on Inés Valdez’s notion of “justice as a political craft,” we explore situated struggles for change and justice. Coping with injustice is contingent on context-specific conceptual and practical understandings of justice and grounded in particular experiences. Drawing on symbolic sites—the Uprising, the Audience, the Body, the Affect, the Island, and the Map—we highlight a variety of struggles against past, present and future injustices. Struggles for political change arise out of expanding, sometimes exploding, transitional justice knowledge(s). Claims to (in)justice are being made and received in different physical and symbolic sites. We lay out a framework of justicecraft to capture these intricacies, drawing on different conceptual lenses and empirical illustrations

Entre 2015 y 2018 el gobierno colombiano se propuso aumentar el área sembrada e incrementar la productividad agropecuaria del país mediante una política de desarrollo llamada “Colombia Siembra”. Para esos propósitos, se le encargó a la Unidad de Planificación Rural Agropecuaria – UPRA la elaboración de zonificaciones del suelo a nivel nacional por su aptitud productiva para ciertos cultivos promisorios. Los trabajos resultantes sirvieron como fundamento a condicionamientos de acceso al crédito de fomento agropecuario con recursos públicos canalizados por el Fondo de Financiamiento del Sector Agropecuario – FINAGRO. Aunque las labores de espacialización del derecho son frecuentes, la problematización de sus formas espaciales y la (re)configuración, producción e intervención del espacio mediante la actividad experta-burocrática, ha estado enfocada predominantemente en la propiedad. Por ello, desde la óptica de la geografía jurídica, así como la literatura crítica del endeudamiento, esta investigación busca analizar la zonificación agropecuaria como construcción burocrática de una aptitud del suelo excluyente, fundamentada en supuestos de productividad autoevidentes. Así como, su incidencia en el espacio vivido de agricultores de los municipios de Granada, Fuentedeoro y Vistahermosa (Meta) mediante el condicionamiento crediticio. Una aproximación como la sugerida aquí, apunta a problematizar los usos del suelo y a señalar la necesidad de la teoría jurídica de preguntarse por las dimensiones espaciales del derecho que intervienen en las posibilidades de usar la tierra

This chapter seeks to explain the developments of the Tunisian transitional justice process. Drawing on Norbert Elias’s ideas about social processes, it argues that dynamics of transitional justice processes can neither be understood solely in light of international norms and the “justice industry” that both shape institutionalized transitional justice projects, nor simply by examining context and the political preferences of domestic actors. Rather, these shifts are shaped by the interplay of planned processes with unplanned political and social dynamics; with a political context in flux, power shifts, and sometimes competing planned efforts in other realms. Empirically grounded in “process-concurrent” field research in post- “Arab Spring” Tunisia, the contribution shows that a technocratic/institutionalized transitional justice project can develop dynamics that are somewhat, but not entirely, independent of power shifts. However, the above interplays may lead to frictional encounters that trigger feedback loops, new processes, and new structures.

What role can political and institutional engineering play in promoting reconciliation and inclusion? Drawing on the Tunisian experience with transitional justice, I argue that there are two interrelated pathways. First, transitional justice processes offer a framework for initiating political and institutional change, often having these official goals. Second, they rarely have the competencies to actually do so, meaning that the implementation of political and institutional reforms geared at fundamental change depends on other political and institutional actors. Thus, transitional justice processes and their potential for contributing to political and social change are also subject to changing political environments, preferences and power structures.

Exploring the challenges and risks of social science fieldwork, this book shares best practice for conducting research in hostile environments and pragmatic advice to help you make good decisions. Drawing on the authors’ experiences in regions of conflict and grounded in real-world examples, the book: Provides practical guidance on important considerations like choosing a research question in sensitive contexts; gives advice on data and digital security to help you minimize fieldwork risk in a contemporary research environment; offers tools and templates you can use to develop a tailored security framework.

This article makes a theoretical presentation to the texts presented in this special issue on Walter Benjamin and Law. Initially, we sought to briefly reconstruct the recent emphasis on Benjamin's texts that address law. Subsequently, we made brief comments on the texts that tries to introduce some of the theoretical debates in which they are inserted, some of its important aspects, or even discuss some editorial choices.

In welcher Beziehung stehen Frieden und Gerechtigkeit zueinander? Kann es ohne Gerechtigkeit Frieden geben? Und inwiefern können Gerechtigkeitsmaßnahmen zu Frieden beitragen? Diese Fragen werden oft in Verbindung mit einem Maßnahmenkatalog diskutiert,der gemeinhin als ‚Transitional Justice‘ bezeichnet wird. Dieser umfasst neben (nationalen und internationalen) strafrechtlichen Maßnahmen auch Wahrheitskommissionen, Reparations- oder Kompensationsmaßnahmen, Gedenkstätten und öffentliches Entschuldigen. Je nach Definition werden aber auch Amnestievereinbarungen als Teil von Transitional Justice betrachtet. Um zu erläutern, was Frieden mit Transitional Justice zu tun hat – und umgekehrt – werden zunächst die normativen Ziele von Transitional Justice vorgestellt, um anschließend kurz in die sogenannte ‚Peace versus Justice‘-Debatte einzuführen, in der es um die Frage geht, ob Frieden und Gerechtigkeit in Konkurrenz zueinander stehen. Schließlich werden empirische Effekte von verschiedenen Transitional Justice-Maßnahmen auf Frieden aufgezeigt und diskutiert.

Die Wahrheitskommission in Tunesien hat Verbrechen der Vergangenheit aufgearbeitet. Doch für eine bessere Zukunft reicht das noch nicht.

Adopting a discourse-theoretical perspective on contentious politics in Egypt, this article investigates how in early 2016 the transfer of the archipelago of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia became a catalyst for oppositional subject formation and the emergence of an unlikely protest coalition. Drawing on a combination of protest event analysis and discourse analysis, it explores how the land swap provided the opposition with an opportunity to challenge the state’s nationalist prestige, and produced relations that favoured cross-movement mobilisation. The so-called ‘Popular Campaign to Protect the Land’ brought together leftists, liberals and nationalists, and thus enabled the articulation of broader socio-political demands in an otherwise closed context. The case study illustrates how dissonance between the discourse and practices of nationalist regimes can trigger cross-ideological collaboration. It furthermore shows how the emergence, as well as the trajectory and goals of such alliances, are shaped by interaction with the state.

The military coup against president Morsi in July 2013 sparked the largest wave of Islamist mobilization in Egypt’s modern history. As the ousted president’s supporters took to the street in what became known as the ‘anti-coup’ movement, they were met with fierce repression. This article retraces the contentious dynamics in the summer of 2013 in a nested research design and with a focus on contentious repertoires. Drawing on data for over 2400 protest events and debunking the myth of a swift defeat of the anti-coup protests, we show how repression, besides affecting protest levels, markedly changed the quality of contention. Most notably, three transformative events involving massive repressive violence impacted on protest spaces, tactics and timing: rather than binary notions of escalation vs. demobilization, adaptive mechanisms of decentralization, diversification and substitution dominated the anti-coup movement’s reaction to repression. Centralized mass protests evolved into smaller, more flexible, and highly decentralized forms that were better fit to skirt the regime’s repression efforts. Our findings have important implications for the theorization of the protest–repression-nexus. They prompt scholars to conceive of repression and backlash as multi-layered phenomena and study their effects in a disaggregate framework.

Seit den Umbrüchen von 2011 ist der zuvor als stabil angenommene Arabische Raum zurück in den Fokus der Vergleichenden Regimeforschung gerückt, welche die Transformationsprozesse, die vielerorts Volksaufständen folgten, vorwiegend unter dem Gesichtspunkt von Demokratisierung betrachtet. Der Erkenntnisgewinn dieses Zugangs ist unter Regionalforschern allerdings umstritten, die auf die Multidirektionalität und -Dimensionalität der arabischen Umbrüche hinweisen, die von Land zu Land äußerst unterschiedlich verlaufen sind. Dies ist nicht nur eine Folge verschiedenartiger struktureller Dispositionen, etwa hinsichtlich Regimetypus oder der Organisation von Machtzugängen. Vielmehr ist die hohe Varianz unter den Transformationspfaden, die die arabischen Gesellschaften eingeschlagen haben, vor allem das Ergebnis von Machtkämpfen zwischen Protestakteuren, Regimeeliten und ihren Sicherheitsorganen. Neben den Aktivisten der Volksaufstände haben sich in den vergangenen vier Jahren besonders die nationalen Armeen, und islamistische Vereinigungen als Kernakteure in den Transformationsdynamiken erwiesen. Dieser Beitrag präsentiert einen Überblick über die relevante Forschungsliteratur, die seit dem Arabischen Frühling innovative Perspektiven auf diese vielschichtigen Wandlungsprozesse geliefert und zu ihrem besseren Verständnis beigetragen hat.

Viele Tunesier haben konkrete Erwartungen an den Prozess der Transitional Justice: Wahrheit, Gerechtigkeit, Wiedergutmachung und Garantie der Nichtwiederholung sollen gewährleistet werden. Aber ist die neue Wahrheitskommission überhaupt in der Lage, dies zu leisten? Oder besteht die Gefahr, dass das Vorgehen eher politischen Interessen nutzt?

Anhand einer Fallstudie zum Protestzyklus der ägyptischen Anticoup-Koalition im Spätsommer 2013 geht das Working Paper der Frage nach, welche Art von Repressionen, gegen wen und zu welchem Zeitpunkt in einem autoritären Kontext eskalierend oder demobilisierend auf soziale Bewegungen wirken. Es kombiniert die Auswertung von Eventdaten mit einer qualitativen Tiefenanalyse einzelner Protestepisoden und liefert so ein historisches Narrativ über die Protestdynamiken in Ägypten in den ersten Monaten nach dem Militärcoup. Die Fallstudie offenbart den Konflikt in Ägypten als dynamischen und reziproken Prozess, bei dem das Verhalten von Sicherheitskräften und Demonstrierendne stetig durch das ihres Gegenübers konditioniert wurde. Sie zeigt, dass staatliche Repressionen zwar insofern wirkten, als sie gewisse Protestformen effizient unterdrücken. Ein effektives Werkzeug zur Kontrolle der Anticoup-Kampagne waren sie aber nicht. Prozesse funktionaler Ausdifferenzierung, Dezentralisierung und die Diversifikation von Protesttaktiken stellten stattdessen das Überleben der islamistischen Protestkoalition sicher. Da es dieser jedoch nicht gelang, durch innovative Frames die Basis für Koalitionsbildung jenseits des islamistischen Oppositionsspektrums zu schaffen, blieb eine breite Welle der Solidarisierung gegen das Regime aus. Die Gegenreaktion auf repressive Gewalt blieb somit auf den engeren islamistischen Unterstützerkreis beschränkt.

This paper wants to explore what the rich academic literature on democratic transition, political transformation and democratization can contribute to our understanding of the transformation processes initiated in some Arab countries by the 2011 events. The questions that this paper addresses include the following: - How has the research on transition and transformation so far dealt with the Middle Eastern experience? - Are there useful insights from research on transition in other regions of the globe? - Which theories or approaches can help us understand how certain constellations (institutional, cultural, economic, historical, etc.) shape the trajectory and outcome of transformation processes?

The article explores the relevance of postcolonial studies for critical social analysis. It introduces core themes of postcolonial studies as well as their critique as a basis for an exploration of postcolonial perspectives on resistance and transformation, feminism and globalisation. The authors demonstrate the thematic variety of postcolonial studies and the ways in which they combine investigations of material and discursive aspects in their analyses of colonial inflections in past and present power relations. Drawing on foundational anticolonial as well as current postcolonial literature, the article points out the implications of epistemological and methodological innovations/ reconceptualisations within postcolonial studies for critical social inquiry.