Knowledge for Peace: Transitional Justice, knowledge production and an agenda for research

Transitional justice, like other peacebuilding endeavours, strives to create change in the world and to produce knowledge that is useful (Goetschel and Pfluger 2014: 55). But the politics of how this knowledge is produced, shared and rendered legitimate depends upon the relationships between different epistemic communities, the way in which transitional justice has developed as a field, and the myriad contexts in which it is embedded at local, national and international levels. Lemay-Hébert and Mathieu’s work on epistemic communities of peacebuilding (2014) which operate as “sites of a constant struggle over how to define which qualifies as valid knowledge” (Bush and Duggan 2014: 233) draws our attention to the dynamics of competition and contestation over what legitimate knowledge is. This work can be usefully brought to bear on transitional justice, speaking to current debates in the literature on positionality, justice ‘from below’, marginalisation and knowledge imperialism. This working paper presents a selection of chapters each dedicated to exploring an aspect of knowledge production or knowledge community either conceptually or in the three cases of Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique or South Sudan. They are each written by members of a research team working together on the project Knowledge for Peace: Understanding Research, Policy, Practice Synergies. We are in the project, and this working paper, most interested in how knowledge is generated, how the boundaries of such knowledge come to be determined, which forms of knowledge are considered to be more legitimate, and how the politics of knowledge production shape the types of policies which are considered, designed and implemented.