Strategic Network on Justice, Conflict and Development

One of the most pressing challenges for many developing countries is how to achieve and maintain peace. Conflict makes development in any form (economic growth; poverty reduction; increased human rights protection) extremely difficult to achieve. This has been recognised by international organisations and aid donors, and much development assistance is now directed to conflict resolution in Fragile and Conflict Affected States (FCAS). This network focuses on one of the main ways in which states and the international community now approach conflict resolution: the promotion of justice initiatives. The use of 'transitional justice' (TJ), including trials, commissions of inquiry, reparations and amnesties, has increased markedly since the 1990s, with justice seen as a way to end conflict and achieve societal reconciliation. Academic and donor work has attempted to assess the impact of TJ on peace and development, but has produced inconclusive, even contradictory results. This leaves a significant research gap, and a pressing need to fill it as donors increasingly fund justice projects as part of development agendas, and policy makers and advocacy groups seek to achieve justice for, and promote the welfare of, conflict-affected populations.

The network is motivated by a desire to better understand the relationship between justice and development by focusing on four conflict-affected developing countries (Colombia, Sri Lanka, Syria and Uganda). Each of these states (or opposition groups, in the case of Syria) is currently making decisions on what kinds of TJ institutions to build, often under pressure from the international community, but without robust evidence about the likely impacts of their policy options. The network brings together 18 academic and non-academic experts, plus civil society project partners, who collectively have a broad range of knowledge and experience in the case sites and elsewhere. Project partners will facilitate links with stakeholder groups (including those whose voices tend to be marginalised within policy circles, such as those displaced and dispossessed by conflict; woman; youth) and arts organisations, to feed alternative sources of knowledge into the network. Most participants are either nationals of developing states or work in them.

The aim of the network is to develop interdisciplinary research agendas, relationships and capacities to understand the interactions between TJ institutions and development in FCAS. To achieve this aim, the network objectives are 1) Develop ambitious and impactful comparative research agendas on justice and development in FCAS, including applying for at least one large grant; 2) Synthesise, map and disseminate existing research and identify knowledge gaps, including by engaging alternative sources of knowledge; 3) Foster interdisciplinary engagement by capacity and relationship building; 4) Engage policy makers, advocacy groups and publics in case sites and elsewhere.

The network will be hosted by the LSE Centre for International Studies. It will achieve its objectives through three sets of activities: 1) Project workshops, to be held in Colombia, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Uganda (plus a 'virtual' workshop). Workshops will be attended by all network participants plus local researchers and stakeholders. They will be structured around conceptual frames (e.g. Conflict/ Peace; Legal/ Political; International/ Local) rather than cases or disciplines in order to generate creative approaches to research questions and methods. 2) Activities organised around workshops to maximise engagement with, and benefits to, stakeholders, e.g. public roundtable discussions; meetings between network participants and policy makers, journalists, non-academic stakeholders and PhD students; exchange visits to case sites for network participants. 3) Virtual engagement via an interactive project website (including open access resource centre), a series of blog symposia and a LinkedIn Group.

As academic beneficiaries are discussed separately, this section deals solely with non-academic stakeholders. Non-academic beneficiaries include: the project partners; civil society institutions seeking to influence justice and development agendas in the case study states (Colombia, Sri Lanka, Syria and Uganda) and in other states experiencing conflict and transitions from conflict; policy makers in the case sites interested in understanding the interactions between justice institutions and development; policy makers in states considering adoption of particular justice mechanisms; international institutions seeking to influence conflict cessation and development (e.g. donors; UNDP; DfID; International Center for Transitional Justice). Less directly, members of the public in conflict-affected states tend to be highly impacted by violence and poverty, and therefore have a great deal of interest in its termination and in campaigning for forms of justice and development.

The project draws on a strong track record of civil society and policy maker engagement by the investigators. The network's activities will facilitate knowledge exchange between academics and research users. Project partners and non-academic participants in the network will contribute substantively to the workshops, and also benefit from them in terms of exposure to relevant research and generation of new contacts in comparable states.

'Impact activities' likely to benefit non-academics will take place alongside all in-country academic workshops. These will include policy meetings between network participants, project partner representatives and policy makers or journalists and public roundtable discussions, along with events, exhibitions and meetings run by project partners. These activities will take place in conflict-affected regions as well as capital cities. Particular care will be taken to invite to events more marginalised stakeholders, including women, plus groups of specific relevance in the case sites (for instance, trade unionists and landless peasants in Colombia, representatives of missing persons in Sri Lanka, representatives of Syrian refugee groups and IDP returnees in Uganda). All impact activities will be publicised on the network website and by the investigators and project partners through their own extensive networks.

In addition to in-country activities, the dissemination of the network's resource centre is likely to be useful to non-academic researchers and activists, particularly, but not exclusively, in the case sites. The website will include a map of current research, links to open access content and non-academic materials, working papers and blog posts by network participants and details of, and contacts for, current research initiatives participants are engaged in. The website will also include welcome pages, project details and contact details for network participant key contacts (plus, eventually, a summary of the network's final report) in Spanish, Sinhalese, Tamil, Arabic and Swahili. A LinkedIn Group will also be set up to allow a wide range of non-academic stakeholders to participate in the network by connecting with like-minded researchers and sharing relevant content.

The network will have an institutional home at the interdisciplinary LSE Centre for International Studies, giving it further capacity for impact. The Centre is a collaborative venture between the Departments of Economics, Government, History, International Development, International Relations, Law, Social Policy and Sociology and aims, inter alia, to facilitate in-depth dialogue on international issues and to stimulate research collaborations between LSE academics and scholars and practitioners elsewhere. The PI is the Director of the Centre and the CIS Management Committee has approved hosting the network at the Centre, giving potential for impact within UK non-academic communities through events hosted at LSE and publicity on the Centre's website.