Decolonising Transitional Justice: A Framework For Historical Reparation For Afro-descendant Peoples In Colombia

This thesis examines Afro-descendant advocacy processes and mobilisation around the issue of historical reparation in the context of transitional justice, and in particular how key transitional justice moments in Colombia have provided an important platform and political opportunity to put the issue of historical reparation in the public debate. Through discourse analysis of human rights and advocacy reports written by Afro-descendant organisations, analysis of the content and scope of relevant norms and jurisprudence, and interviews and focus groups around advocacy strategies, the thesis explores, how Afro-descendant activists have mobilised around the issue of historical reparation through decolonial and people-centred processes in two key ways:

Primarily it shows how, through advocacy processes at three key moments in the Colombian transitional justice landscape, Afro-descendant activists have shaped and influenced the transitional justice normative framework leading to a progressive body of norms and jurisprudence that seek to address not only victims’ rights in general but the ethnic, racial and collective damages suffered by Afro-descendant peoples during the armed conflict as well as the structural and historical underlying factors that have led to a differential impact of conflict on Afro-descendant peoples.

These normative achievements are demonstrated through the language and scope of provisions contained in Constitutional Court rulings around forced displacement, Laws and Decrees on the right to reparation for victims of the internal armed conflict, and the Final Peace Agreement between the FARC-EP and the National Government all of which now embody an important “ethno-racial focus.”

Secondly, through decolonial analyses of the unbroken chain of racial oppression and violence since the colonial period and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the current moment of armed conflict and in the neoliberal development agenda, Afro-descendant activism has challenged many of the traditional critiques and arguments against reparation for slavery by demonstrating that it is an issue of past, present and continuing injustice as colonial crimes continue in the contemporary context of coloniality.

The thesis shows how transitional justice provides a useful and important language and framework for articulating reparation demands centred on issues of truth, structural transformative change and guarantees of non-repetition. When this is articulated though the language and visions of the autonomous, ethno-territorial and people-centred rights struggles of Afro-descendant organisations in Colombia it creates the case for a decolonial and transformative historical reparation which goes beyond general claims limited to economic compensation to include structural demands for land, autonomy and self-determination that would address both past and present injustice and create the conditions for the non-repetition or non-continuance of racial injustice into the future.