Victimhood, Justice and Agency

: The narratives on transitional justice in Nepal

Abstract

The transitional justice discourse is a widely recognized field of study and armed with a globally accepted set of mechanisms and practices, it aims to respond to the grave human rights violations in the post-conflict and post-authoritarian societies. However, the scholarship is increasingly getting contested, primarily because it is situated within the theoretical underpinnings of the liberal paradigm, which produces its own biases and challenges for the discourse. The main contestations of the dominant narrative are that it privileges western-styled, individualistic, legalistic, universalistic, elitist and state-centric notions of justice. This has meant that its theories and practices have been unable to articulate and address the needs that victimhood creates, and recognize how the victims of violence exercise agency in their everyday living.



Taking Nepal and its armed-conflict as a case study, the research aims to explore the concepts of victimhood, justice and agency by integrating its many facets and its complexities, informed by the lived realities of the victims of conflict and within the realm of the ongoing transitional justice processes in the country. It examines how victims’ identity and victims’ agency are shaped and influenced by competing and contradictory discourses, interwoven within complex dynamics of social relationships, and in the context of high levels of historical inequality and marginalization. The research does so by adopting a bottom-up approach, where it places emphasis on the needs, experiences and expectations of the victims from marginalized communities, living in the rural, remote and traditional societies in Nepal. As such, it presents a multi-layered understanding around these three concepts from the grassroots, from ‘below’, where these notions manifest uniquely and differently in messy socio-economic and political contexts and within conflicted societies. The research also analyses the power hierarchies and relationships between the victims and the stakeholders of the Nepali transitional justice processes – the state, political actors and transitional justice community, who influence, politicize and intervene in the victims’ justice agendas. It examines how their lack of understanding and appreciation for the victims’ particular contexts and constructs can help reinforce victims’ marginality, further reaffirming their experiences of victimhood.



The research has adopted critical ethnography methodology, which has enabled a contextually rich form of qualitative research to better understand and challenge the existing power structures and structural inequalities prevalent in the Nepali transitional justice practices and Nepali society in general; to analyse the wider social, economic and political contexts shaping the victims’ interpretations and experiences of justice, victimhood and agency; and to undertake a reflexive inquiry process to explore how my positionality impacts on how I acquire, interpret and analyse the knowledge gathered during the fieldwork. The research and its analysis have been informed by extensive fieldwork conducted in the Bardiya and Makwanpur districts of Nepal, amongst a range of victim groups, including those whose family members were abducted, disappeared and killed, those who were physically disabled and injured, those who were physically tortured, those who suffered rape and sexual violence and those who were internally displaced during the conflict.



This research makes its primary contribution to the global studies of transitional justice and the contemporary debates and discussions that are critical of the mainstream scholarship and that encourage bottom-up and victim-focused approaches to understand the complex, multifaceted and divergent conceptions of victimhood, justice and agency. It emphasizes on participatory and inclusive practices that can help design and implement transitional justice that is based on the particular needs and expectations of the victims, rather than embracing a discourse that is dependent on the ideologies of liberalism and universalism.

Date of Award	Jul 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Coventry University
Supervisor	Gordon Crawford (Supervisor), Chas Morrison (Supervisor) & Bahar Baser Ozturk (Supervisor)