Failing Victims? The Limits of Transitional Justice in Addressing the Needs of Victims of Violations

Transitional justice represents itself as both a discourse and practice that exists primarily to support victims of human rights violations and gains its moral legitimacy from the fact that victims are deserving and the claim that transitional justice has the aim of acknowledging victims and providing redress. Here, this claim is interrogated in the light of a practice that actually appears to be rooted in liberal state-building, and for which victims are an essential instrument of prescribed mechanisms of transitional justice, such as trials and truth commissions. Evidence is presented that, despite a common rhetoric claiming that transitional justice is ‘victim-centred’, its principal mechanisms, namely trials and truth commissions, are actually driven by the needs of the state. A dominant legalism has seen mechanisms such as prosecution privileged over those that serve victims, such as reparation. One result of this institutionalisation of transitional justice processes is that victims have little agency in such processes and participate as instruments of those mechanisms, rather than on their own terms. Social and economic rights remain largely ignored by transitional justice mechanisms, despite these being central to both the addressing of victims’ needs and the causes of conflict. It is posited that rather than being driven by victims, transitional justice is an arm of global liberal, and often neoliberal, governance, sometimes sustaining systems that create many of the needs that victims articulate

Full-Text Retrievals and EBSCO Discovery Service: Assessing Usage of E-Journals across Multiple Platforms

This study utilizes COUNTER 5 data from the University of Dayton (UD) to measure full-text retrievals of e-journal articles from five major academic journal publishers (Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Oxford, Wiley, and Springer). Usage data from these publishers’ e-journals within EBSCO is compared to the same content when accessed from publisher platforms such as Wiley Online Library or SpringerLINK. Building on previous studies that have largely focused on links (or referrals) from the library discovery layer to publisher platforms, this study analyzes usage of full text-articles stored within EBSCO Discovery Service and EBSCOhost subject databases to consider how these full-text holdings within EBSCO might affect referrals to publisher platforms. The findings indicate that full-text article holdings within EBSCO are used more often than the same content in publisher platforms, suggesting that UD students and researchers rely heavily on—and likely often start with—EBSCO for their learning and research

You Might Not Realize It, but You\u27re Probably Reading an Open Access Article ...

To celebrate Open Access Week (Oct. 25-31), coordinator of electronic resources and discovery Simon Robins describes UD\u27s usage of open access content in learning and research

Climate Research: Metrics, Ethics

If you\u27re looking for another reason to publish open access (OA), consider climate change. While increased citations aren\u27t a guarantee, open-access publications do reach larger audiences

Death as the Border : Managing Missing Migrants and Unidentified Bodies at the EU's Mediterranean Frontier

The paper explores how the management of migrant bodies by national and EU authorities reflects particular understandings of contemporary borders and how the failure to address such bodies has implications far from the frontier. The study of the management both of the dead and of the data that can serve to identify missing migrants, can benefit our understanding of the contemporary border, and has to date received only limited scholarly attention. To address this gap we draw on field research carried out on the Greek island of Lesbos, one of the key migrant entry points to the EU, that has seen repeated incidents of deadly shipwrecks. Based on interviews with families of migrants and local stakeholders the paper explores how death at the border introduces novel – and often invisible – borders and categories of inclusion and exclusion. By shedding light on the experiences of the families of the dead we aspire to introduce a critical set of actors who have been marginalized from the study of the border. In exploring the remote effects of deaths on such families in migrant countries of origin, the paper shows that bordering practices have transnational impacts at the human level, thereby broadening our conceptualization of the border

Transitional Justice and Theories of Change : towards evaluation as understanding

This article has two goals. First, to make explicit the theories of change currently operative within transitional justice and, second, to critically engage with both these theories, and dominant theories in international development. As such, it seeks to replace a focus on results, attribution, and linearity with a privileging of process, contribution and complexity. Developing theories of change for transitional justice is challenging, as it is characterised by diverse interventions, complex and contested contexts, and the need to balance principles and pragmatism. Normative, linear and mechanism-based claims remain dominant, while the evidence base for transitional justice is still weak. This article looks at insights from adjacent fields, some of the challenges facing the development of theories of change within transitional justice, and evidence from impact studies and evaluations. In a final section we propose an alternative, drawing on complexity theory and actor-oriented approaches, which suggest an important set of terms – systems, interaction, contingency, context, encounter, emergence, incrementalism – to inform what we term evaluation as understanding

Community Over Commercialization

Recognizing the power of community is a crucial step in connecting people to free, immediate online access to information

Characterising the tidal stream power resource around France using a high-resolution harmonic database

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