Community Drivers Influencing the Effectiveness of Transitional Justice

This research examines how migrant and formerly displaced communities evaluate the effectiveness of transitional justice. Transitional justice programs help communities rebuild, reform, and repair legal and non-legal relationships and systems. This research investigates if and how land attachments and work relations are critical to local community evaluations of transitional justice.

This research is important because transitional justice is an integral feature of community development and critical to maintaining effective community relations and local government infrastructures. This project uses the plantation as site of agricultural land and labor production to investigate why land attachment and work relations are critical to community evaluations of transitional justice.

In doing so, it complements available data on the effectiveness of transitional justice within the development sector in order to improve the capacities of these programs to provide justice. Research findings will interest development actors, donors, lawmakers, and policymakers who aim to understand transitional justice programming's long-term effects.

The project also provides training for graduate and undergraduate students in methods of rigorous, scientific data collection and analysis.

The researcher will examine land use, labor practices, and life relations among linguistic and ethnic minorities and will gather data using qualitative research methods, including participant observation, ethnographic interviews, archival research, and community mapping. Interviews will be conducted with local communities to study if and how prior experiences with agricultural labor and residence influence transitional justice programming outcomes.

Participant observation will provide data on how local communities use and value land and what kinds of work they perform to feel socially and economically secure after transitional justice programming concludes. Community mapping and archival research will provide material evidence of transitional justice programming's effectiveness and what outcomes, if any, benefitted local communities.

The broader research findings will support studies of transitional justice, the agricultural economic sector, land use, and work relations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.