Dr Josh Bowsher, Teaching Fellow in Sociology, has published
a new article. This article has emerged out of his interdisciplinary doctoral research which
used social and cultural theory to examine the intersections between
transitional justice and neoliberal forms of globalisation.
First developed by
human rights lawyers and activists, transitional justice began following the
democratisations in Latin America as a series of experiments designed to
address the human rights legacies of the authoritarian regimes from which many
countries emerged. Transitional justice now denotes a range of mechanisms,
including truth commissions, criminal trials, lustration, and so on, used to
deal with human rights legacies in societies emerging from conflict or
authoritarian rule. A ‘global project’ of global governance, transitional
justice is now intertwined with the peacebuilding initiatives of the United
Nations (UN) and the World Bank, which advocate the use of transitional justice
mechanisms in much of Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and some parts of
South-East Asia.
Much of the scholarship on transitional justice has remained
“normative”, and seeks to investigate the relative merits of different
approaches to transitional justice, in order to advocate various practices for
the field. More recently, some scholars have taken a more critical perspective,
questioning the assumptions that underlie transitional justice. Increasingly,
these approaches have focused on the enduring relationship between transitional
justice and the project of liberalism, focusing on the ways in which its
discourses and practices often obfuscate or even exclude questions of
socio-economic injustice and structural violence that are integral to
understanding the periods before, during, and after conflict.
Nevertheless, by locating the emergence of transitional
justice within the global rise of neoliberalism, I argue that transitional
justice serves an important function in regards to the particularly neoliberal
contours of many transitions. This relationship, I argue, can be understood by
turning towards the conceptual terrain provided by recent research emerging
from the field of critical neoliberalism studies. More precisely, the article
insists that understanding the relationship between transitional justice and
neoliberalism can be best understood by utilising the term “omnus et
singulatim”.
Before I continue, I should explain my recourse to this
term. After all, in commenting on his decision to name his 1979 Tanner lectures
“Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason’”, Michel
Foucault apologised, perhaps in a rare flash of self-consciousness, that ‘the
title sounds pretentious’. Nevertheless, the conceptual terrain inaugurated by Foucault’s
use of the term has become fertile ground for criticisms of forms of liberal
government and their social dynamics, particularly in the work of Wendy Brown.
For both Foucault and Brown, “omnus et singulatim” captures the paradox of a
liberal (and neoliberal) form of government that is, on the one hand, obsessively
concerned with individual liberties, and, on the other hand, must gather its
individuals together into some sort of social body. Omnus et singulatim is thus
the double movement, that simultaneous act of gathering society together and
individualising its members, ‘achieving’, as Brown remarks ‘each through its
seeming opposite.’
For my part, this term captures 3 things. Firstly, what
Brown understands as neoliberalism’s propensity to individualise us as
enterprises seeking to invest and profit from our human capital, all the while,
integrating us as stakeholders into technocratic and administrative projects,
divorced from any of their political implications. Secondly, it captures
transitional justice’s attempts to construct narratives about the conflicts it
attends to in individualising ways, that is through the physical suffering of
individual victims, which is done in the name of reconciliation, a “bringing
together” which is infused with the technocratic language of consensus. Finally,
then it captures the dynamic, or the concrete practices through which the
latter can perform a service for the former, bringing together war-torn
societies in ways that do not challenge, but instead prefigure, the
neoliberalising demands of post-conflict transition.
In a world that is dominated, by flexible, unwieldy, and
often devastating neoliberalism(s), understanding the relationship between it
and practices that both legitimise and substantively contribute to its various unfoldings
and reconfigurations in post-conflict contexts is important. Hopefully this
article may provide one way of approaching this problem.
