Arenas of Accountability: Rethinking the Spaces of Transitional Justice
On 8 September 2026 the Centre of Criminology and the Centre for Law and Society (UCT), and the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS (University of London) co-hosted a public seminar entitled "Arenas of Accountability: Rethinking the Spaces of Transitional Justice".
Who gets to decide what justice looks like – and where does that decision take place? This seminar introduces arenas of accountability, a new framework for constructing and analysing transitional justice responses to historical crimes. This concept emerges from a three-year, six-person research project conducted across three continents. Rather than picturing accountability flowing downward from international institutions to the national and the local, the arenas concept treats it as a relational and often contested space, shaped by unequal power. Authority, resources and legitimacy are never evenly distributed among those who compete to define what justice means – and who counts as its rightful claimant.
This seminar presented snapshots of six diverse empirical case studies spanning research sites across Africa, Europe and Latin America, which inform the arenas concept. These cases include the International Criminal Court's own understanding of its role in global accountability; the largely forgotten United Nations War Crimes Commission and its network of postwar domestic trials; the ongoing crisis of enforced disappearances across Latin America; the entanglement of Rwanda's post-genocide gacaca courts with the Ubudehe welfare system; land and housing struggles in inner-city Johannesburg; and the use of international criminal law within global migration governance and border control. Together, these cases show that accountability rarely proceeds along a single line or hierarchy – each speaks, in its own way, to how power shapes what justice becomes.
Chair and Discussant:
Dr. Saghar Shahidi-Birjandian (Collaborative Structural Change and SOAS)
Presenters:
Dr. Luisa Calvete Portela Barbosa (SOAS University of London)
Prof. Phil Clark (SOAS)
Prof. Cath Collins (University of Ulster and Universidad Diego Portales, Chile)
Dr. Leah Owen (Swansea University)
Dr. Nicola Palmer (UCT)
Prof. Dan Plesch (SOAS)