Transitional Justice from the Margins : Collective Reparations and Tunisia's Truth and Dignity Commission

The Tunisian revolution of 2011 moved from socio-economic to political concerns, and from the margins and periphery of the South and West of the country to the centre, Tunis, driven by the slogan of “jobs, dignity and freedom”. The goal of this article is to understand the potential of using the spatially informed concept of marginalisation to reimagine transitional justice, using the “victim zone” as a case study. The Truth and Dignity Commission's founding legislation tasked it with identifying victim zones that had “suffered systematic marginalisation or exclusion” and proposing reparation for structural violations suffered. Empirical data collected from two disadvantaged regions of Tunisia are used to provide a bottom-up, victim-centred, look at structural and economic violence. The IVD has largely failed to-date to deliver on its promise in relation to collective reparations, but a combination of theory and empirical data provides a springboard for a discussion of how the margins could unsettle current transitional justice practice, both normatively and practically. The article concludes by outlining an unfinished business agenda for Tunisia and implications for future transitional justice. Specifically, it argues for a transitional justice from the margins that focuses on space as well as time, collectives as well as individuals, a normative plurality rather than a single universalised global framework, decentralised agency rather than centralised institutional primacy, and a new social contract (forms of participation and recognition) rather than the continuity of elite bargains

Autism in Phenylketonuria Patients: From Clinical Presentation to Molecular Defects

International audienc

Large-scale participation in policy design: citizen proposals for rural development in Tunisia

International audienceMore and more literature and practice recommend involving the public at the early stages of the policy cycle, i.e. issue identification, definition of the policy objectives and policy design. Policy design involves, among others, identifying solutions, ideas or alternatives which may address the policy objectives. Three main arguments are often put forward to advocate for the involvement of stakeholders, or the public, in policy design: a "user-centered " argument (i.e. for the policy to better meet people's priorities), an innovation argument (i.e. to conceive new solutions) and a collective argument (i.e. to identify collective actions and better tackle environmental problems). However, in both research and practice these arguments have been challenged. Research has insufficiently generated evidence of the influence of large-scale participation in policy design on resulting proposed actions. The objective of this paper is to analyze whether a large-scale participatory process leads to action proposals that fit people's priorities and that are innovative and collective. It draws from a land management and rural development policy design experiment conducted in six vulnerable areas of Tunisia. 4,300 direct participants were involved and 11,583 action proposals were collected. Our results highlight the influence of the local circumstances on innovation and the interest towards collective actions. Our results also show that whether policy design is made individually or in group influences the outcomes. The results also suggest that appropriate facilitation can help fostering more collective and innovative actions. We conclude the paper by opening up the idea of hybridizing policy design methods with methods from political and agricultural sciences in order to better understand the drivers and rationalities behind participants' action proposals