Abstract
First developed by human rights lawyers and activists, transitional justice emerged from the so-called third wave of democratisations in Latin America. Over the last 30 years, transitional justice has risen to become a ‘global project’ of global governance. Locating the emergence of transitional justice within the global rise of neoliberalism, this article shows that transitional justice serves an important function in regards to the particularly neoliberal contours of many transitions. Understanding this relation, the article argues, is best served with recourse to what Wendy Brown describes as neoliberalism’s practice of omnus et singulatim, a double process through which ‘communities’ are gathered together as stakeholders to take part in economic activities whilst simultaneously being individualised as ‘responsibilised’ and self-sufficient entrepreneurial units. Taking this concept, I argue that transitional justice also undertakes a process of omnus et singulatim that usefully prefigures and supports processes of neoliberalisation during ‘transition’. Transitional justice, it concludes, does the necessary work of bringing conflictual, traumatised, societies back together, whilst doing so on terms that do not threaten but instead prefigure the individualising demands made upon subjects at the sites of neoliberal transition.
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Notes
Dardot and Laval (2013, pp. 40–55) show that the term ‘neo-liberalism’ was coined and deployed in the early part of the twentieth century by neoliberal intellectuals such as Louis Rougier and Gaëtan Pirou. The term ‘neo-liberalism’ eventually distinguished this body of thought from the ‘new’ liberalism, that is now mostly associated with the Keynesianism that dominated economic policy in the middle of the twentieth century.
Foucault uses the spelling ‘Omnes’ rather than ‘Omnus’.
Although, interestingly, the phrase, omnes et singulatim, is not used within the lecture apart from its title, making it one of Foucault’s less developed terms.
Compounding this issue, as Mirowski points out, committed neoliberals might themselves reject this label.
Although I alert the reader to the recent histories of human rights undertaken by Moyn (2012, 2014), which demonstrate that transitional justice and human rights emerged as a hardy ‘utopia’ that responded to the dramatic failures of the more programmatic visions of society offered by socialism, Keynesianism and so on. In this respect, one could certainly speculate that transitional justice became popular in policy circles because its own ‘pragmatic’ and ‘realistic’ micro-utopianism did not threaten, and, in fact, could compliment neoliberal policies which were often framed in terms of their own ‘realism’ or ‘pragmatism’.
I use ‘sound’ here to denote competitive tax rates; a smaller, more efficient public sector; and so on. The point is that the Sierra Leonean TRC readily incorporated neoliberal assumptions that the economy is not a political but a technocratic formation that can be optimised to work for everyone.
Socio-economic victimisation, for instance.
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to Tom Harding and Stefanie Petschick, whose comments on an earlier draft of this article helped to sharpen its style and content. I also thank the reviewers for their helpful comments, which have greatly improved the article.
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Bowsher, J. ‘Omnus et Singulatim’: Establishing the Relationship Between Transitional Justice and Neoliberalism. Law Critique 29, 83–106 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9198-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9198-3