Can Transitional Justice be Decolonised?

The article seeks to contribute to ongoing debates over whether transitional justice can be decolonised. In recent years, transitional justice scholarship and practice has entered a period of self-interrogation, as the proliferation of critical literature has increasingly questioned its aims and scope. Despite this critical turn, questions of decolonisation remain a blind spot, constituting one of the weakest points in scholarship and practice. This article therefore seeks to fill this gap by examining whether transitional justice can truly be decolonised. Drawing upon decolonial theory, it identifies manifestations of coloniality in transitional justice and investigates whether pathways towards decolonisation exist. This article concludes that transitional justice cannot be decolonised, as it is both built upon and continues to rely upon coloniality. This argument is developed through an exploration of three themes: the liberal teleology of transitional justice; its enactment of epistemic violence; and its inability to engage with structural forms of violence. These features render the decolonisation of transitional justice unfeasible, despite reforms which have aimed to integrate an awareness of colonialism and foster incremental improvements in scholarship and practice. The article instead advocates for a turn towards transformational forms of justice, which prioritise structures of inequality and alternative ways of knowing.