Journal Articles by Zinaida Miller
Just Security, 2023
Nathan Thrall's harrowing new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Trag... more Nathan Thrall's harrowing new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, illustrates the slow, enduring violence of decades of Israeli occupation through the lens of a singular tragedy. At the heart of the book is a fatal 2012 school bus accident in which Abed Salama's five-year-old son Milad and several other Palestinian children are killed at the outskirts of Jerusalem. As Thrall's telling makes clear, the accident could be labeled accidental in only a literal and immediate sense: no one intended, planned, or desired it. And yet, the conditions that made a rainy day deadly were far from accidental. It was not only weather, or individual decision-making, or bad driving that led to a fatal collision between Milad's school bus and a semitrailer truck. It was also poor infrastructure, undertrained drivers, a lack of regulation, and failed schools; a physical obstacle in the form of the Separation Barrier dictating where children attend school, play, and receive medical care; and that Israeli military and police forces are tasked primarily with protecting Israeli lives while the Palestinian Authority, in many parts of the West Bank, is prohibited from operating. Moreover, Palestinian life has become simultaneously globally less visible and locally more precarious in recent years: Palestinian national aspirations have been marginalized in regional and global politics even as Israeli settlers, supported by extreme right-wing governments, further expand their territorial control over the West Bank while terrorizing Palestinians. The story Thrall tells, with precision and compassion, is one of a normalized regime of state violence that impedes, reroutes, and structures Palestinian life every day. It is a regime comprised, framed, and regulated by and through law, even if Thrall doesn't frame it this way. It might seem inapt or even inappropriate to recall a decade-old tragedy as Israel besieges and bombs Gaza. Yet the story of five-year-old Milad Salama bears telling in this moment because his death was structured by the same mundane, slow violence that conditioned his, his father's, and millions of others' whole lives. It reveals how structural
International Journal of Transitional Justice , 2024
To write about race and transitional justice begins in many ways from a point of radical impossib... more To write about race and transitional justice begins in many ways from a point of radical impossibility. There is no plausible repair for the transatlantic slave trade. There is no apology available for apartheid. There is no amount of money, prison time, truth or apology that could possibly address either the atrocities of slavery and colonialism or the brutally unequal afterlives they have wrought. Despite the inevitable incommensurability of any forms of justice with the practices of violence they address, justice must nonetheless be pursued. The three works discussed here, along with many other important recent contributions, grapple admirably with both the horrific scope of the problems and the difficult, unsatisfying work of repair. The foundational question of how to understand or to remember-let alone to redress-'historical' harms reverberates throughout work on race and transitional justice. Both the transitional justice enterprise and the study of constructions of race, racialization and racism require a Janus-faced approach to time, looking simultaneously forward and backward. Transitional justice has always been caught between accounting for the past and establishing basic guarantees for the future. 1 While one impulse lies in the desire to discover what has happened in the past-and, if possible, to hold someone or some state/institution accountable for it-the future-oriented
London Review of International Law, 2024
Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 2021
Resurgent debates in U.S. law and politics over reparations and racialized inequality reflect wha... more Resurgent debates in U.S. law and politics over reparations and racialized inequality reflect what this Article argues is a significant transnational legal phenomenon: courts, policymakers, and social justice advocates mobilizing pasts of racial and ethnic violence and dispossession to justify competing rules for the distribution of resources and power today. In the United States., South Africa, Canada, and Israel/Palestine, significant legal and political battles revolve around the relationships among past, present, and future. Judges and advocates identify progress from or rupture with the past; embrace or reject institutions intended to record and resolve past events; and attempt to silence or center past violence when interpreting rights in the present. In the U.S., arguments about whether and how slavery is relevant to contemporary racialized inequalities arise in litigation around affirmative action and reparations. These debates contest not the horror of that past but rather its linkage with the beneficiaries of racial privilege today given the passage of time and the formal legal end of slavery and segregation. In South Africa, a critical fault line has emerged between those who view the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the post-1994 Constitution, and Constitutional Court judgments as representative of a flawed but foundational break with the atrocious past and those who assert that today’s radical, racialized inequalities derive from legal and constitutional continuities with the colonial and apartheid pasts. In Canada, recent public debates over the legal definition of genocide revealed tensions over the distribution of resources and power between Indigenous and settler Canadians. The question of whether genocide ended or continues represents a fundamental contest over the material consequences of colonialism in the present. The final case study examines the evasion of the past in the Oslo Accords and its subsequent effects on the structure of Israeli-Palestinian relations. While the predominant argument held that engaging the past would only provoke further conflict, activists and advocates countered that the radically unequal distribution of territory, population, and power in the present can be understood only in relation to past violence and dispossession. Together, the case studies reveal the material stakes of legal and political assertions of the resolution, distance, reproduction, legacy, afterlives, or erasure of racialized violence and dispossession.
International Criminal Law Review, 2021
This article describes the ways in which transitional justice work has helped constitute a predom... more This article describes the ways in which transitional justice work has helped constitute a predominant narrative about time in relation to violence, memory, and judgment. It suggests that transitional justice practices, institutions and discourses have coalesced into a form of 'temporal governance' , which privileges a limited conception of the relationship between time and justice. Temporal governance posits linear progress narratives premised on ruptures between past and present and distinguishes traumatic, proximate pasts available for justice from more distant, irretrievable ones. These features potentially lead not only to less robust versions of the past but to more anaemic visions for the present and future. In the process, transitional justice practices may also marginalise accounts of multiple and plural temporalities. The article also discusses contemporary movements that attempt to defy the predominant form of temporal governance, particularly those focused on both the historic harms and continuing violence of colonialism, settler-colonialism, and slavery. These movements also reveal the difficulties of challenging temporal assumptions about intergenerational and structural harm, benefit, and responsibility. Precisely because the past is so central to contemporary struggles for justice, it is all the more important to scrutinise which past is centred, who defines it, and how it is remembered, judged, recognised, and mourned.
Transnational Legal Theory, 2020
This article argues that fundamental critiques of the transitional justice enterprise paradoxical... more This article argues that fundamental critiques of the transitional justice enterprise paradoxically ended up stabilising it through a mode, style, and experience of (un)governing that I call 'embedded ambivalence'. Transitional justice has come to be characterised by certainty about its objectives (justice, peace, truth, reconciliation), but also by increasing uneasiness about the efficacy or benefits of its forms (transnational solutions, criminal law, state-based truth inquiries). The enterprise was built on the foundation of transnational and experiential comparison and commensurability, making it possible to incrementally expand the scope, institutions, and modes of regulation as a response to important critiques. Challenges remain, however. While self-critical expansion can improve the enterprise, it can also facilitate the evasion of foundational challenges. Repeated expansion raises questions about how and where to delimit the enterprise. Recent debates over the capacity of transitional justice to incorporate decolonial approaches or a praxis of solidarity highlight these tensions.
As How Everything Became War describes, the methods and practices of contemporary violence have g... more As How Everything Became War describes, the methods and practices of contemporary violence have gradually eroded traditional legal and political distinctions between war and peace. Classifying a particular time and space as war, peace, or something in between defines the universe of permissible harms, relevant victims, and appropriate experts. It also has ramifications for governance: Who governs the war or the peace when so little separates the two? This article explores this question through two lenses: time and judgment. It first describes the ways in which temporality frames conflict and violence. The article then examines how decisions about the applicability of war or peace paradigms are equally choices about allocating authority, responsibility, and judgment.
International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2013
International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2008
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It no longer seems revolutionary to say, as Duncan Kennedy did over twenty years ago, that “Law s... more It no longer seems revolutionary to say, as Duncan Kennedy did over twenty years ago, that “Law schools are intensely political places.”1 As Kennedy himself argues in this issue of Unbound, today’s law professors “have correctly and honestly internalized the irreducible political element in law,” and accordingly law faculties feature a rich pluralism of overlapping and conflicting methodologies, political positions, and legal-theoretical commitments. But has this pedagogical shift done much to make these three years a less alienating or painful experience? We’re not so sure. Law school still trains us to see ourselves as technicians rather than agents; operatives rather than entrepreneurs; managers rather than provocateurs. Many students who arrive with visions of using the law as a tool for social transformation become quickly disillusioned and pessimistic about the possibilities for change, eventually leaving with a diminished sense of agency and an undefined sense of loss for ide...
Book Reviews by Zinaida Miller
How and why does a world in constant confl ict come to appear as one of legal, political, and eco... more How and why does a world in constant confl ict come to appear as one of legal, political, and economic order? In World of Struggle, David Kennedy argues that people deploying the vocabularies of expertise shape the global order by fi rst engaging in continuous, ruthless battles and subsequently hiding those skirmishes from view. In the process, "struggle and distribution disappear as experts embody the voice of reason and outcomes are assimilated as facts rather than contestable choices" (5). In many arenas, those facts become the hardened concrete of unequal distribution, a set of arrangements made incontestable through invisibility: the obscurity of the expert decision-makers, the rationalized language of decision, and the veiling of prior struggle in present agreement work together to naturalize the status quo. In this ambitious and far-reaching book, Kennedy reveals what is at stake in understanding struggle and confl ict as endemic rather than exceptional and in comprehending law as a tool for distributing resources and power rather than an instrument "for ordering, problem-solving, or expressing global values" (12).
Book Chapters by Zinaida Miller
The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, 2023
This chapter argues that notions of time and temporality are central to the study and practice of... more This chapter argues that notions of time and temporality are central to the study and practice of transitional justice. The first part of the chapter, “The Times of Transitional Justice,” explores the vying origin points and histories of the field of transitional justice. It contends that both the methodological focus and starting point of an historical study influences how flexible and inclusive the transitional justice field appears to be in contemporary context. The second section, “Time in Transitional Justice,” analyzes the ways in which transitional justice institutions and scholars shape perceptions of the past and ideas about mourning, grief, and reconstruction. It argues that transitional justice practices often promote a vision of justice for harms committed in a relatively recent past that has been—or soon will be—successfully overcome. In doing so, they may make it more difficult to account not only for continuing harm and inequality but for complex, contested pasts. The final section traces the continuities between colonial temporalities enforced through violence and the temporality embedded in contemporary transitional justice by tracing two sets of challenges to mainstream accounts of time in transitional justice: counter-histories (which define the material and ideological stakes of different historical choices) and counter-practices (which contrast assumed singular or linear modes of mourning and memory with Indigenous, postcolonial, and pluralist conceptions). By assessing time from multiple perspectives, the chapter calls for closer attention to the ways in which justice institutions may unwittingly reinforce rather than transform past and present forms of temporal domination.
Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda, 2016
International Law and Transitional Governance: Critical Perspectives, 2020
When does a transition end? Does a static set of rules determine the end or does a contextual ana... more When does a transition end? Does a static set of rules determine the end or does a contextual analysis govern the choice of applicable rules? What changes in
political and economic power, governance, and law signal the commencement or completion of transition? Is transition an objective classification based on empirical characteristics or a political decision based on subjective determinants and contextual distributions of power? This chapter argues that the determination of an end to a transitional or post-conflict stage is itself embedded in a series of debates about the nature of
and need for such a stage at all. Those ideas build on and intertwine with a series of legal and policy practices of external rule, international intervention, and accountability that share certain assumptions, and sometimes common deformations. To govern the transition means more than an administrative title or an official grant of public power. Governance begins with classification: territories become transitional once they are so labeled. Once categorized, a vast number of multiple, competing, decentralized, disparate actors become involved in the distribution and receipt of financial, legal, and human resources. As a result,
determining the end of a transitional or post-conflict era requires understanding the import of the classification itself as well as the role of multiple actors who
engage in this particular type of rulership with significant effects on individuals and institutions. Moreover, it requires striking a balance between the desire to
replicate past successes through the creation of blueprints for governance – which can lead to underestimating the importance of context – and an exaggerated attention to the local that obscures outside contributions to conflict, inequity, and disarray. This chapter examines the possibility of an “end” to transition by inquiring into the “ends” of transition.
Stabilising the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa: Regional Actors and New Approaches, 2019
This chapter identifies ways in which transitional justice in the post-2011 Middle East and North... more This chapter identifies ways in which transitional justice in the post-2011 Middle East and North Africa has affected stability, shaped change and allocated power. Using examples drawn from Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, the chapter focuses on the conditions of transition, the choice of justice practices, the treatment of economic harms and the relationship between time and justice. In doing so, it argues for a view of justice projects as distributional and political—and thus as critical sites of social contestation—rather than inherently stabilising or destabilising. As the chapter demonstrates, in certain circumstances, transitional justice can generate a persistent confrontation with a violent past as well as a space to challenge an unequal present. It can also, however, be instrumentalised on behalf of the powerful, deployed against the weak or defanged and delegitimised.
Indigenous (In)Justice, 2013
Media by Zinaida Miller
London Review of Books, 2023
Just Security, 2020
As a scholar of transitional justice, I am heartened by efforts to de-exceptionalize the United S... more As a scholar of transitional justice, I am heartened by efforts to de-exceptionalize the United States and to bring race and anti-Black racism into conversation with international law and justice mechanisms. At their best, such efforts could help to expose and clarify the legal and political structuring of white supremacy, connect it to global structural inequality, open up narratives of American suppression and repression, and link today’s racialized inequality and violence with their long histories. They could help make discussions of reparation and repair real. Yet these fields have their own limitations and blind spots, particularly when it comes to questions of material redistribution and racialized inequality. The following five points comprise a preliminary effort to inject a note of caution as well as hope to these discussions.
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Journal Articles by Zinaida Miller
Book Reviews by Zinaida Miller
Book Chapters by Zinaida Miller
political and economic power, governance, and law signal the commencement or completion of transition? Is transition an objective classification based on empirical characteristics or a political decision based on subjective determinants and contextual distributions of power? This chapter argues that the determination of an end to a transitional or post-conflict stage is itself embedded in a series of debates about the nature of
and need for such a stage at all. Those ideas build on and intertwine with a series of legal and policy practices of external rule, international intervention, and accountability that share certain assumptions, and sometimes common deformations. To govern the transition means more than an administrative title or an official grant of public power. Governance begins with classification: territories become transitional once they are so labeled. Once categorized, a vast number of multiple, competing, decentralized, disparate actors become involved in the distribution and receipt of financial, legal, and human resources. As a result,
determining the end of a transitional or post-conflict era requires understanding the import of the classification itself as well as the role of multiple actors who
engage in this particular type of rulership with significant effects on individuals and institutions. Moreover, it requires striking a balance between the desire to
replicate past successes through the creation of blueprints for governance – which can lead to underestimating the importance of context – and an exaggerated attention to the local that obscures outside contributions to conflict, inequity, and disarray. This chapter examines the possibility of an “end” to transition by inquiring into the “ends” of transition.
Media by Zinaida Miller
political and economic power, governance, and law signal the commencement or completion of transition? Is transition an objective classification based on empirical characteristics or a political decision based on subjective determinants and contextual distributions of power? This chapter argues that the determination of an end to a transitional or post-conflict stage is itself embedded in a series of debates about the nature of
and need for such a stage at all. Those ideas build on and intertwine with a series of legal and policy practices of external rule, international intervention, and accountability that share certain assumptions, and sometimes common deformations. To govern the transition means more than an administrative title or an official grant of public power. Governance begins with classification: territories become transitional once they are so labeled. Once categorized, a vast number of multiple, competing, decentralized, disparate actors become involved in the distribution and receipt of financial, legal, and human resources. As a result,
determining the end of a transitional or post-conflict era requires understanding the import of the classification itself as well as the role of multiple actors who
engage in this particular type of rulership with significant effects on individuals and institutions. Moreover, it requires striking a balance between the desire to
replicate past successes through the creation of blueprints for governance – which can lead to underestimating the importance of context – and an exaggerated attention to the local that obscures outside contributions to conflict, inequity, and disarray. This chapter examines the possibility of an “end” to transition by inquiring into the “ends” of transition.