New Article in World's Foremost Human Rights Journal

As transitional justice (TJ) has developed a global standard for addressing past and ongoing harms, it matters what gets included as an appropriate and relevant object of redress. How does the field of TJ respond to novel calls for inclusion of problems such as corporate complicity in war crimes, environmental crimes, or indigenous harm? In a new article in Human Rights Quarterly, Line Jespersgaard Jakobsen, Thomas Obel Hansen and Line Engbo Gissel analyse the field's 'boundary work' to understand how it regulates its subject matter: Justice chiefly for physical violence against humans (not animals and nature) and if perpetrated by states or insurgents (not corporate actors). We apply Thomas Gieryn's boundary theory to understand responses to socio-economic, corporate, and environmental injustices, drawing on Colombian TJ and - as a proxy for the TJ script - TJ manuals and toolkits. 
Key insights: 
? The standardization of TJ both restricts and enables the field's expansion
? Inclusion of an injustice in the field of TJ does not guarantee enforcement of the crime
? Boundary work is a form of politics that shapes the evolving field

The article combined different disciplines and research traditions: Law, Political Science and Global Studies. Thereby it illustrates the strengths of an interdisciplinary research project.