About the project
Transitions affect our schema of familiarity and predictability. For example, climate change could mean that our current expectations in terms of energy consumption, mobility and housing are not met. Moreover, transitions might disappoint our expectation of not being retroactively disadvantaged. In distributing the remaining carbon budget, fairness is likely to require consideration of our past emissions and the benefits we have realized from emissions-generating activities. For these reasons, conflicts are likely to arise over how we should manage this transformation.
Looking at these conflicts from the perspective of transitional justice requires assessing them in terms of the path we should follow to change the status quo. In the 20th century, traditional justice was understood in terms of transition processes from regimes that supported or failed to prevent egregious human rights violations to democratic, constitutional governments. Often referred to as transitions to democracy, prominent examples of this are Germany after the Second World War and South Africa after apartheid.
The global transformation to a decarbonized society does not seem to fall into the category of transition to democracy, as it is not about remedying blatant human rights violations. Rather, it aims to secure conditions of justice for future generations and to prevent serious harmful effects of climate change. Through their emission-causing activities, people have not committed human rights violations as such, at least as long as they could have had no knowledge of the long-term effects of their cumulative emissions.
This project argues that transitional justice should and can serve as a guideline for a new generation of transitions. As a normative practice, we can conceptualize transitional justice through the role it plays in the public sphere. At the same time, its historical origins require an examination of the sources of political and philosophical controversies during historical transitions.
The project will explore the hypothesis that the role of transitional justice is to assess the conflict between people's historically formed legitimate expectations and the expectations that arise during or because of the transition process. The project aims to show that this conflict was at stake in previous transitions to democracy, and that it is at stake now in a new generation of transitions.
Why should we consider both the historical and the new generation of transitions as part of the same approach? As a result of past transitions, societies have inherited a narrative about past political tragedies through collective memory. They have also inherited a moral consciousness about transition, but this has been less studied. A political conceptualization of transitional justice could be not only a conceptual but also a discursive tool capable of triggering a collective know-how memory to identify the just path for bringing about a transformation to a just future.