Adam Branch

Elisa Finohiaro

The flashy branding of the transitional justice process as ‘TJ’ does more to keep oppressive systems in place than to bring real progress where it is needed. Transitional justice must be used as a catalyst to foment real, case-by-case systemic changes instead of as a one-size-fits-all neoliberal template.

UN Photo

Acronyms used to conceptualise transitional justice and forced displacement can have negative political consequences when deployed to understand situations and inform interventions, observes Adam Branch, as ‘people start to take that acronym for uncontested reality, forgetting the words that make it up’.