Global Players: A TJA Program Publication on Transitional Justice
Our program partners Arts of the Working Class have just published Global Players, an issue dedicated to transitional justice. Developed as a core public output of our ongoing Transitional Justice with Artists (TJA) program, the issue was co-edited by our joint research group and features contributions from members from the AFIELD Network.
Around the world, a slogan has become an editorial in its own right: No Justice, No Peace. It is the compressed, urgent descendant of an older argument—one Martin Luther King made about the Vietnam War—that peace, brokered without justice, can end up serving power rather than restraining it. A ceasefire is not the same as accountability. This distinction sits at the center of Arts of the Working Class’ new issue.
Global Players begins with a question that refuses easy resolution: What does justice actually require—and justice for whom, decided by whom? From Venezuela to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, and Gaza, the shortcomings of international law to hold the full range of actors accountable for war crimes and colonial violence has provoked a kind of collective reckoning. This issue sits inside that reckoning.
WHERE TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE COMES FROM
The framework of Transitional Justice encompasses mechanisms derived from international law to transform nations after mass human rights violations, authoritarian rule, and repression. Transitional Justice’s four pillars—the right to know, the right to justice, the right to reparation, and the right to non-repetition—reference the Nuremberg Trials, which set a template—accountability, truth-seeking, compensation—for how the international community responds to atrocity. Since then, international organizations in collaboration with nations have adapted that concept in different contexts: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Latin America’s transitions out of military dictatorship, the postwar reckonings in the Balkans. But as many practitioners argue, the aftermath of violence rarely moves in a straight line. It loops. It resurfaces. Trauma does not resolve on a tribunal’s schedule.
THE LIMITS OF LAW, AND WHAT ART CAN DO INSTEAD
This issue grapples with the fact that much of international law is written in the Global North, in legal language that keeps art—and lived experience more broadly—largely outside the formal processes through which justice gets rebuilt. Global Players pushes against that exclusion. It proposes that art, precisely because it is less rigid and more able to hold contradiction, can do work that legal language cannot: bearing witness, restoring the texture of memory, build community, naming what tribunals leave unnamed—the gap between legal principle and what people actually live through.
That proposition extends visually through a collaboration with Tawna, an Amazonian film collective whose work treats the moving image as testimony, currently on view at the first Ecuadorian Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale.
INSIDE THE ISSUE
Supply Lines foregrounds first-hand accounts from those closest to conflict: conflict facilitator Hamida Giyasbayli writes on how political exile reshapes the language available for describing states of in-betweenness, while Inés Condori testifies on her participation in an artistic project by Alejandra Gutiérrez Ballón about the looting of dignity suffered by women subjected to forced sterilization in Peru.
Command Centers widens into a critical conversation, featuring Gregory Sholette on the role of socially engaged art in a market-driven art world, critical questions deriving from intersections of transitional justice with other fields, as well as a situated critique of transitional justice in Sri Lanka, from the “Third World Approaches to International Law” movement, authored by Sujith Xavier.
Reverberations turn toward other forms of structural harm and geopolitical complexity—algorithmic governance, urban precarity, the politics of green space—through work by Wang Yiquan, Andy Liu, Paolo Caffoni, Shokoufeh Eftekhar, Ozan Güngör, and Laura Langenais.
Tactics follows artists working on the ground, inside conflict zones and carceral systems, with a contribution from Aly Abdallah together with ThiYazan Al-Alawi in Yemen, discussing the effect of funding agendas on artistic potential for freedom, reflections on documentation as an artistic tool with the example of Fatma Hassona, dying during the film production of Sepideh Farsi’s film on their relationship, as well as invisible and invisibilized artistic labor with Jailtime Records, Renzo Martens and CATPC.
Side Games closes the issue with Joseph Kaifala’s Interactive Life Path, a meditation on the accumulated choices that determine a life devoted to transitional justice.
And the issue circles back to where it started: on the cover, artist Shokoufeh Eftekhar responds in poetry to the question of what it means to be shaped by law. Their answer, characteristically in limbo: I am somehow.
CONTRIBUTORS
This issue brings together an extensive international group of artists, writers, researchers, and practitioners: ThiYazan Al-Alawi, Aly Al-Qarm, Paolo Caffoni, CATPC, Inés Condori, Shokoufeh Eftekhar, Feminist Culture House, Hamida Giyasbayli, Zahara Gómez Lucini, Ozan Güngör, Jailtime Records (Dione Roach and Steve Happi), Amelie Jakubek, Joseph Ben Kaifala, Laura Langenais, Jesse Laurie, Andy Liu, Lydia Markaki, Renzo Martens, Brunilda Pali, María Inés Plaza Lazo, Krishan Rajapakshe, Gregory Sholette, Ced’Art Tamsala, Abi Tariq, TAWNA, Chantal Wong, Wang Yiquan, Sujith Xavier, and Rico Zyrrano.
IMPRINT
Founder / Publisher / Editor at Large: María Inés Plaza Lazo
Editor in Chief: Dalia Maini
Associate Editors: The research group of the Transitional Justice with Artists project (Amelie Jakubek, Abi Tariq, Chantal Wong, Lydia Markaki)
Copyediting: William Kherbek, ezo karamell
Distribution and Administration: Laurentiu Dragota
Layout, Design: Manuel Burger
This issue is co-funded by the European Union, in partnership with AFIELD and Framer Framed.