Requiem for a Pipedream: Oil, The World Bank, and the Need for Human Rights Assessments

The revenues associated with oil and other extractive industries projects in sub-Saharan Africa\u27particularly as they are contrasted with the living conditions of those for whom these revenues could provide the greatest benefit\u27raise the hope of using natural resources to achieve significant poverty alleviation. From the impoverished villages of the Niger Delta to south Sudan, however, oil wealth has rarely led to widespread poverty alleviation. More often than not, the revenues that should in theory be a great boon to development are in practice associated with disastrous human rights fallout as living standards actually decrease and governance indicators worsen, a phenomenon known as the \u27resource curse.\u27 This Article analyzes the various \u27lessons learned\u27 that have been articulated in the wake of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project\u27s collapse, and argues that many of them miss the mark

Mapping the nexus of transitional justice and peacebuilding

This paper explores the convergences and divergence between transitional justice and peace-building, by considering some of the recent developments in scholarship and practice. We examine the notion of ‘peace’ in transitional justice and the idea of ‘justice’ in peacebuilding. We highlight that transitional justice and peacebuilding often engage with similar or related ideas, though the scholarship on in each field has developed, largely, in parallel to each other, and of-ten without any significant engagement between the fields of inquiry. We also note that both fields share other commonalities, insofar as they often neglect questions of capital (political, social, economic) and at times, gender. We suggest that trying to locate the nexus in the first place draws attention to where peace and justice have actually got to be produced in order for there not to be conflict and violence. This in turn demonstrates that locally, ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ do not always look like the ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ drawn up by international donors and peace-builders; and, despite the ‘turn to the local’ in international relations, it is surprising just how many local and everyday dynamics are (dis)missed as sources of peace and justice, or potential avenues of addressing the past

Forced Displacement at the Juncture of Transitional Justice:Opportunities and Risks

Currently, the field of transitional justice is applied mainly in (post)conflict settings, which is why theorists have begun to argue in favor of the adoption of policies of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition in matters related to forced displacement. This article critically analyzes these arguments and concludes that, when dealing with forced displacement, the existing humanitarian protection framework, inspired by a distributive rationality, must prevail over the corrective rationality that informs transitional justice. Otherwise, this can lead to discriminatory treatment among displaced persons, the absorption of resources that could be used to address the most pressing issues for that population, and the current protection framework may suffer setbacks. The challenge that arises is how to give priority to the humanitarian framework at a time when corrective measures, in the form of transitional justice, seem to have become the rule.</p

Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding:The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

This paper examines ‘the local’ in peacebuilding by examining how ‘local’ transitional justice projects can become spaces of power inequalities. The paper argues that focusing on how ‘the local’ contests or interacts with ‘the international’ in peacebuilding and post-conflict contexts obscures contestations and power relations amongst different local actors, and how inequalities and power asymmetries can be entrenched and reproduced through internationally funded local projects. The paper argues that externally funded projects aimed at emancipating ‘locals’ entrench inequalities and create local elites that become complicit in governing the conduct and participation of other less empowered ‘locals’. The paper thus proposes that specific local actors—often those in charge of externally funded peacebuilding projects—should also be conceptualised as governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors’ voices and their agency, and thus (re)construct ideas about what ‘the local’ is, or is not