Open access
TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE – TRANSITIONAL VIOLENCE
Karol CHROBAK1
Varia
Publication language: English
Journal article
Transformations No. 4 (115) 2022, Publication date: 28 December 2022
Keywords: violence, political crisis, transitional justice, scapegoat ritual
Abstract The article’s subject is transitional violence, which is closely related to transitional justice. Transitional justice refers to strategies aimed at stabilising social relations, i.e., restoring conditions that enable their effective functioning in the new social order (restitution of the so-called “working relationships”). Transitional violence is one such strategy. It consists in using acts of violence to replace the old, oppressive political order with a new one that is, at least in principle, more just. A typical example of this type of violence is the institution of the scapegoat, whose critical task is to solve a social crisis by sacrificing the individual who symbolises it. The phenomenon of transitional violence is analysed here both in the systemic context (when it is an action resulting from the assumed legal or customary order) and the extra-systemic one (when it is the result of a spontaneous reaction, such as a pogrom or lynching). As a result, nine categories of transitional violence are distinguished, of which only those implemented in a formally generalised manner and directed against people determined based on their individual characteristics are considered as potentially morally justified. The concept of transitional violence developed here can be applied in such fields of knowledge as political philosophy, political science, legal science, and political sociology.
Faculty of Social Sciences, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Poland
ORCID: 0000-0002-0922-5252
E-mail: karol_chrobak@sggw.pl