Call for papers

Race, Racism and Transitional Justice

The recent uprising for racial justice marked a pivotal shift in national and global debates on race. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest the systemic dehumanization and devaluation of Black people both in the United States and across the globe. Demands for racial reckoning and transformation expanded to include other historically subordinated groups, including Indigenous Peoples, whose societies, communities, and territories remain subject to settler colonialism, genocide, dispossession, extraction, erasure, and exploitation rooted in colonial, neocolonial, and related forms of imperial racial injustice. The aim of this Special Issue is to consider transitional justice within this broader and renewed demand for racial justice and reckoning.

White supremacy, persisting legacies of the transatlantic trade in enslaved persons, and of colonialism remain embedded in the legal, political, social, and economic fabric of many societies. Both in the Global North and the Global South, nationally and transnationally, societies remain structured by racial injustice attributable to historical injustice that has never been fully repaired, and contemporary injustice sustained by institutions, epistemologies, and practices that carry forward the racial logics of colonialism, slavery, apartheid, Jim Crow, and related systems of racial subordination.

This Special Issue seeks to explore the ways in which transitional justice has been complicit and even instrumental in the preservation and reification of racial injustice in practice and in theory. It will consider what possibilities, if any, transitional justice has offered for undoing this injustice, focusing specifically on racial injustice borne of the transatlantic enslavement and trade in enslaved people, colonialism, and their contemporary legacies. We welcome submissions from across disciplines and geographic regions. We also welcome diverse methods and perspectives. We are especially interested in work from authors who are traditionally marginalized within academic publishing for reasons related to systemic racism and other forms of subordination within academic publishing.

We offer the below as potential lines of inquiry, but they are by no means exhaustive of topics that we would like this Special Issue to consider:

• How have race and racism shaped transitional justice as a discipline and as a practice, and what are the possible futures in this regard?

• How has the literature on transitional justice addressed or failed to address racial injustice and the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, including colonial dispossession, genocide, extraction, and exploitation?

• How have diverse experiences of race and racialization in the Global North and South, at the local, national, and transnational levels, in the past and in the present, shaped the contexts in which transitional justice has been deemed the appropriate response?

• How in practice have countries responded to racial injustice utilizing transitional justice methodologies and what can we learn from these responses?

• Does transitional justice provide the appropriate tools to address racial injustice that is simultaneous of the past and present?

• How do recent demands for reckoning with systemic and historic racial injustice implicate transitional justice’s own valorization of liberal democracy as the goal of successful transitions?

• Can transitional justice respond to social movement demands and visions for racial justice and the remaking or abolition of unjust societal arrangements, including material redistribution of wealth secured through colonial theft and mass violence?

• What does racial justice require of transitional justice in terms of affirmative action, reparations, land redistribution, and transformation more generally?

• What can we learn from using race as a frame of analysis about the emancipatory potential or limitations of transitional justice approaches?

• What are the potential avenues and constraints for integrating decolonization and anti-racism in the field of transitional justice?

• What does the right to the truth mean in the context of racial justice? What are victims of racial injustice entitled to know? What is required of current pedagogy and practice as a result?

• What does intersectionality especially as it relates to racism and gender tell us about transitional justice processes and experiences? How does race, heteropatriarchy as well as other forms of oppression influence how transitional justice is envisioned and conducted?

Guest Editors:

E. Tendayi Achiume is the inaugural Alicia Miñana Professor of Law, and former Faculty Director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights. She is also a Research Associate with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand. The current focus of her work is the global governance of racism and xenophobia, and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism for contemporary international migration. In November 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Professor Achiume the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, making her the first woman to serve in this role since its creation in 1993.

Matiangai Sirleaf is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law. Professor Sirleaf ‘s scholarly agenda is to make visible the extant hierarchies in international law and to remedy the inequities reflected in it. Her work seeks to elucidate how seemingly neutral laws further global inequities. Professor Sirleaf is currently editing Race & National Security, a forthcoming volume with Oxford University Press in 2023.

For specific questions about potential submissions please contact the guest editors at  [email protected] / [email protected]

Submission Deadline: June 1, 2023

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE SUBMISSION PROCESS:
https://academic.oup.com/ijtj/pages/General_Instructions