Disruptive Reparations? Tunisia's Victim Regions and the Collective Reparations Dilemma in Transitional Societies

Abstract

In the past decade, an encompassing transitional justice process has been developed in Tunisia, which interacts with various other policy domains, including that of development. This article foregrounds three important interrelated innovations of Tunisia's transitional justice process: The explicit attention to economic crimes and violations of economic, social, and cultural rights; the introduction of the notion of victim regions; and the conceptualization of collective reparation programs. I discuss these innovations in light of the ongoing debate about the collective reparations dilemma in transitional societies, and notably about the ideal relation between (collective) reparation programs and development. The article then introduces the notion of disruptive reparations to theorize this relation in a way that foregrounds the need to consider and disrupt the political, socio-economic, and epistemic structures that facilitated the initial harm. This exercise acknowledges the specificity of various policy domains, and approaches them in a way that is fundamentally rooted in victims’ justice needs.