The concept of transformative justice has been gaining more attention in the academic literature. As opposed to transitional justice, largely limited by its predominant top-down approach, transformative justice offers a more bottom-up understanding of the needs of war-torn societies. Both have a special relation with memory, both deal with how mass human rights abuses are remembered and commemorated. I argue that there is a difference in the way memory is approached by the mechanisms of transitional justice and transformative justice. There is a presumption that the field of transitional justice, dominated by elite international professionals and donor networks, does not authentically reflect the memories of conflict as perceived by local populations. Does this mean that transformative justice, on the contrary, captures people's memories in an authentic fashion?
Transformative justice can be described as an evolved version of transitional justice, having embraced its complexity and indeterminacy. What implication does this have for the way the past instances of violence are remembered? To answer this question, first, I plan to write about the place that memory holds in the transitional justice paradigm, and then explore how (and if) it fits into the burgeoning concept of transformative justice.
