Journal of Peacebuilding & Development

In the past decade, an encompassing transitional justice process has been developed in Tunisia, which interacts with various other policy domains, including that of development. This article foregrounds three important interrelated innovations of Tunisia's transitional justice process: The explicit attention to economic crimes and violations of economic, social, and cultural rights; the introduction of the notion of victim regions; and the conceptualization of collective reparation programs. I discuss these innovations in light of the ongoing debate about the collective reparations dilemma in transitional societies, and notably about the ideal relation between (collective) reparation programs and development. The article then introduces the notion of disruptive reparations to theorize this relation in a way that foregrounds the need to consider and disrupt the political, socio-economic, and epistemic structures that facilitated the initial harm. This exercise acknowledges the specificity of various policy domains, and approaches them in a way that is fundamentally rooted in victims’ justice needs.

Fostering legitimate authority has become a priority of the international peacebuilding and development community, notably in fragile states and conflict-affected settings. Yet, how peacebuilding and development interventions feed into legitimation practices of public authorities remains underexplored, let alone how interveners can strategize on this. Analysis of programs to support land registration in Northern Uganda brings out how interventions not just enhance the legitimacy of targeted authorities. Often unintentionally, they impact on struggles for legitimacy between different state and nonstate authorities and change their relative legitimacy. They do so by redistributing land governance roles and responsibilities; stimulating certain practices of land governance; and contributing to the discussion on legitimacy assessments. The conclusion argues for more sensitivity to legitimation effects of peacebuilding and development interventions.

Debates over localisation in transitional justice and peacebuilding have been characterised by the assumption that more equitable relationships between local and international actors allow for more effective and just interventions. Critical scholarship has in turn cautioned over the use of reified conceptions of the ‘local’ and ‘international’, emphasising each as contested sites. Through a network analysis of transitional justice event data in Cambodia, we ask: what are the roles and influence of Cambodian actors, and what might their positions tell us about the relationships between international and local groups? We find that event data shows strong local representation within the transitional justice community. However, representation is not synonymous with influence. Our data demonstrates an uneven distribution of network positions within both local and international groupings. This illustrates the need for greater attention to the role of individual biographies that advantage certain individuals to shape transitional justice interventions.

This study evaluates news portrayals of resilience in the newly renewed Education for Sustainable Peace in Rwanda initiative. There remains a gap in understanding about how Rwanda's education approaches are portrayed and disseminated to the public by news media. This research uses an inductive coding analysis and layers Entman's framing theory to evaluate new media portrayals of resiliency in the reporting of domestic and international media outlets. This research demonstrates that there has been little media attention paid to Rwanda's education system outside of Rwanda, despite the newly revised programming. This research also finds that in media sources which do discuss Rwanda's education system, portrayals of approaches to resilience that have the potential for inclusivity are far more common than approaches which are top-down and exclusive. These findings serve to contribute to literature in both the context of Rwanda's place in global governance and the broader discussions of educational resiliency.

This article critically explores what peace means for 39 practitioners and stakeholders in the city of Acapulco, Mexico in 2021. Working in non-formal education, community development, the arts, and culturally based activities across the city, their responses provide unique insight into what peace might look like in a city with high levels of inequality, drug-related violence, and crime. Facilitating their vision of peace and getting participants to articulate what peace would look like for them, this article provides insights into practitioners’ views, changing the narrative from them being victims of violence to agents of positive social change. Peacebuilding literature frames the discussion, and the article concludes with lessons derived from the detailed analysis of participant views which might offer a pathway for others living and working in similar contexts.