Transitioning to What? Transitional Justice and Gendered Citizenship in Chile and Colombia

Abstract

This chapter begins to probe the gender implications of the dual insights that specifically legal devices have a range of non-legal implications, and that multi-disciplinary analysis is necessary to understand the full range of long-term consequences of nominally past-focused devices. More specifically, the chapter explores how transitional justice devices influence the incorporation of citizens into the political community of post-conflict and post-authoritarian states. Principally, the chapter contends that legal innovations around amnesty, truth-seeking, and reparations implicitly privilege (recognize and validate) certain forms of political activity, and deny or devalue other forms of political activity. The selective validation of political activities of women and men work to differentially incorporate men and women into citizenship of transitional states. In this way, past-focused legal devices have longer-term implications for the political dispensation of a society emerging from conflict or repression. The chapter draws on feminist theories of citizenship, and applies them to the transitional justice devices utilized in Chile and Colombia, in order to illustrate these dynamics.

Keywords: Gender, transitional justice, citizenship, Chile, Colombia