On June 9, 2022, the TJ standardization project research team presented their work on the standardization of transitional justice at the 9th Annual Conference of the Historical Dialogues, Justice & Memory Network NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
The panel where the three team members Line E. Gissel, Thomas O. Hansen and Line J. Jakobsen presented their work is entitled ‘The Global Search for Accountability Through Standardization of Transitional Justice’. The panel was chaired by Vladimir Petrović (Institute for Contemporary History, Belgrade).
The panel took place on the first day of this year’s Annual Conference of the Historical Dialogues, Justice & Memory Network, which is the 9th of its kind, at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. The conference takes place between the 9th and the 11th of June, 2022, under the theme “Beyond Nuremberg: the Global Search for Accountability.”
The conference is organized by The Historical Dialogues, Justice and Memory Network (www.historicaldialogues.org), which is coordinated by an international Steering Committee and the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability (AHDA) of the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University. The Network holds a large conference for scholars and practitioners working in fields related to history, memory, transitional justice, historical dialogue and related fields on an annual or bi-annual basis.
The panel addressed ‘the global search for accountability’ by exploring the recent standardisation of transitional justice (TJ). The panel invited the audience to reflect on the standardisation of TJ as a recent, global phenomenon involving the ‘generification’ and ‘localisation’ (Demortain 2008) of TJ, as well as its normalization and geographical expansion since the 1990s. The papers explore how we can study and understand the standardisation process, including the extent to which the TJ standard is both consolidated and innovated in practice, discuss who the global standardisers are, and analyse particular cases that illuminate the process.
The papers presented are titled: “The Standard of Transitional Justice” (Line E. Gissel), “Transitional Justice all the time and everywhere – how and why did we get here?” (Thomas O. Hansen) and “The Corporate Turn in TJ – An Innovation of Standardized TJ?” (Line J. Jakobsen).