Understanding “meta-conflict” in sites of transition
Written by SAHR member, Deya Bhattacharya.
Transitional justice, as a field in which lawyers have traditionally been dominant, examines these periods of political transition as legally-underpinned phenomenon. Analysis focuses on legal and quasi-legal mechanisms for dealing with the human rights violations of the predecessor regime. Further, transitional justice increasingly looks to the establishment of rule of law in post-conflict institutions as part-and-parcel of transitions from violence and repression. Hence, reform to the institutions of policing, courts, criminal justice, are now features of the transitional justice landscape. Transition is underpinned by simultaneously forward- and backward-looking legal measures, to facilitate the transition away from violence and repression, toward a new normative order. To the extent that reform is backward-looking, the reform rests on a particular understanding of the wrongs or harms of the past that must be ameliorated. Acknowledgements around what went wrong in the past therefore structure priorities for what is to be addressed in the (re)formation of state institutions.
In transitional societies, however, there seldom exists an agreed narrative of the past or a shared understanding of the deficiencies of the former regime. (…) There persists a “meta-conflict,” or a “conflict about what the conflict is about.”Within this meta-conflict, several narratives of the past
compete for dominance in order to guide the reform to state institutions.These battles over the interpretation of past events, in order to guide institutional reform, are not without implications for women. In particular, the definition of violence to be ended and harms to be addressed by transition carry important implications for the extent to which reform to transitional state institutions will deliver material improvements to the lives of women post-conflict or post-authoritarianism.
— By Catherine O’Rourke, ‘The Shifting Signifier of “Community” in Transitional Justice: A Feminist Analysis’, 23 Wis. J.L. Gender & Soc’y 269, 282 (2008).
