This blog piece is part of our ongoing “Rethinking Legal Research in and with Africa” symposium. To access the introduction explaining the framework, click here (ALS / LDC), to access the overview of the symposium click here (ALS / LDC).
What happens when transitional justice (TJ) moves beyond negotiated peace agreements and post-conflict transitions and instead operates in a setting of ongoing, cyclical violence? In eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this is not theoretical but a lived reality. What emerges there challenges some of the field’s assumptions and sheds light on how zooming in on the everyday realities and actions on the ground can enrich our broader understanding of how justice, development, and peace are imagined.
The region challenges conventional assumptions about TJ, human rights, and sustainable development. Standard frameworks presuppose a linear shift from violence to peace, followed by accountability and reform. In eastern DRC, however, violence persists without a clear rupture. Using decolonial and lived-reality approaches, this article critiques the uncritical application of conventional TJ models and highlights the epistemic gap between dominant frameworks and local realities. [1]
Aparadigmatic as Analytical Lens
Conventional TJ centres on criminal prosecutions, truth-seeking, reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition. These mechanisms are typically deployed after conflict transitions. Its application is evident in the fight against impunity, reparations for victims, and guarantees of non-recurrence through security provision and rule of law. By contrast, the concept of aparadigmatic TJ—justice efforts in the absence of transition—helps make sense of eastern DRC. In its shadow, the concept of aparadigmatic TJ that is, TJ invoked in the absence of a political transition, has gained scholarly traction in recent years.[2] Eastern DRC offers one of its most instructive cases.
After more than three decades of recurring violence without a clear endpoint, TJ in the region is not retrospective but ongoing. It is mobilised by diverse actors, including youth movements, survivor networks, and environmental organisations. Here, TJ is not a retrospective process but functions simultaneously as a tool for accountability, survival, and development.
This is not merely diffusion or localisation of a global framework. As both methodological analysis and grassroots reflections suggest, TJ is being reappropriated as a tool of mobilisation, survival, and transformation. Closer scrutiny reveals, local actors are not merely receiving and adapting a template handed down by international institutions. Local actors are actively reappropriating TJ—adopting its language while reshaping its content to address intersecting injustices that standard approaches often overlook. The key question, then, is whether these bottom-up practices are peripheral adaptations or represent an emerging frontier of TJ and rule of law.
Three examples of how transitional justice is being reappropriated
The argument can be understood through three perspectives: actors, demands, and struggles, each of which illuminates a different dimension of this creative reappropriation of transitional justice language and practice in the region’s context.
Who Is Mobilising It
Civil society, and specifically youth-led civil society, plays a central role. For example Lutte pour le Changement (LUCHA), founded in Goma in 2011, exemplifies this. Although not a traditional TJ organisation, LUCHA advocates for governance, accountability, and basic rights such as water, health, and security.
LUCHA explicitly draws on TJ language in its activism. Through commemorations of victims of state violence and calls for constitutional accountability, it links demands for justice for past atrocities with present struggles for rights. Using the rhetoric ‘We will not forget’ in commemoration of victims of state violence on 23 November 2019 and the 19 November 2024 public call for President Tshisekedi to abide by constitutional limits, reflects a broader demand for rule of law and democratic accountability. What LUCHA does with this language is theoretically significant. Its use of TJ expands the framework, blurring divides between civil-political and socio-economic rights, and between retrospective accountability and forward-looking transformation.
This challenges the state-centric bias of mainstream TJ, showing that grassroots actors—not institutions—can drive and reshape justice processes.
What Is Being Demanded
A second example focuses on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and broader gender justice. Organisations such as Synergie des Femmes and the Mouvement des Survivant.e.s place TJ at the centre of their advocacy, structuring their demands around the framework’s core pillars.
Their approach is notable for its specificity. Rather than embedding CRSV within broad TJ agendas, they use TJ to advance focused justice struggles. Reparations are redefined to encompass not only financial compensation but also psychosocial support, socio-economic reintegration, and structural change. Justice is framed as transformative rather than purely punitive.
These ideas are put into practice through initiatives such as savings and literacy groups that combine livelihood support with discussions of justice and reparations, to encompass holistic psychosocial and socioeconomic support, women’s reintegration into family and community life, and the structural dismantling of the conditions that make sexual violence possible and impunity for it routine. TJ becomes a normative framework linking individual harm to structural inequality.
This occurs within a complex legal environment where formal judicial systems coexist with local and grassroots mechanisms. While formal systems contribute to accountability, barriers such as insecurity, corruption, and weak infrastructure limit access. Local mechanisms may be more accessible but can also reproduce problematic norms. As a result, individuals navigate multiple systems pragmatically.
The Dilemma
A third example is environmental justice. Organisations such as Centre de Recherche sur l’Environnement, la Démocratie et les Droits de l’Homme (CREDDHO) use TJ language to address harms linked to resource extraction, environmental degradation, displacement, and violence.
These actors connect land, environmental harm, sustainability, and human rights to TJ principles of accountability, reparations, and non-recurrence. Their work expands TJ’s scope to include socio-economic and ecological harms, particularly related to mining activities in areas such as Virunga National Park.
This represents a conceptual shift. Traditional TJ focuses on state responsibility and individual perpetrators, whereas environmental harm often involves corporate actors and collective, long-term damage. CREDDHO’s advocacy for collective reparations reflects this reality, recognising that harms are structural, cumulative, and shared across communities.
Transitional Justice as connector- The Justice-Rights-Development Nexus
Taken together, these examples show that TJ in eastern DRC functions less as a fixed mechanism and more as a shared language connecting diverse struggles. It enables actors to link justice claims with broader socio-economic demands and build coalitions.
Several features stand out. First, actors draw simultaneously on TJ, human rights, gender justice, environmental law, and customary systems. This pragmatic pluralism reflects the complex nature of harms and institutional barriers to justice.
Second, this pluralism is generative. Interactions between frameworks produce new concepts, such as holistic reparations, ecological guarantees of non-recurrence, and the integration of social rights into accountability claims. These are not simple adaptations, but innovations rooted in lived experience.
Third, victim-survivors are central. Across all examples, grassroots actors—not institutions—drive innovation. A truly victim-centred TJ must therefore take seriously the possibility that these practices reshape the framework itself, rather than simply fit into pre-existing models.
Implications for the field and socio-legal research
The eastern DRC case raises broader questions for TJ. If the framework can be mobilised in ongoing conflict settings by actors pursuing social, gender, and environmental justice, what defines its core? And who decides?
There are risks. Expanding TJ to contexts without clear transitions may lead to conceptual dilution, temporal ambiguity, and political instrumentalisation. However, an equally serious risk lies in maintaining rigid definitions that exclude practices not aligned with conventional models. Dismissing grassroots uses of TJ as “not real” transitional justice risks reinforcing epistemic hierarchies that privilege international frameworks over local knowledge. In eastern DRC, such exclusion has both practical and theoretical consequences. Without a clear transition, justice in the region emerges as dynamic, plural, and embedded in everyday life. Aparadigmatic cases should not be seen as deviations but as evidence that the original model was always partial. TJ’s foundations lie in responding to the needs of those affected by injustice; allowing local actors to reshape the framework is consistent with that origin. The key is not to abandon coherence but to refine it, balancing flexibility with conceptual clarity. The experience of eastern DRC suggests that the future of TJ depends on recognising diversity.
[1] This blogpost draws on the chapter “Lots to Gain and Little to Lose: Mobilising Transitional Justice as a Means to Connect Various Justice Struggles in the Democratic Republic of the Congo” by Kim Baudewijns published in The Cambridge Handbook of Victim Engagement in Transitional Justice (edited by Tine Destrooper and Elke Evrard, 222–233. Cambridge Law Handbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026); as well as the blogpost authors’ mutual reflections on topics discussed during the workshop Rethinking Legal Research in and with Africa: Legal Methods, Critical Perspectives, and Decolonial Approaches in the Context of Human Rights and Sustainable Development.
[2] Destrooper, Tine, Line Engbo Gissel, and Kerstin Bree Carlson, eds. 2023. “Transitional Justice in Aparadigmatic Contexts : Accountability, Recognition and Disruption.” New York ; London: Routledge.
