Transformative Justice in Practice
Contemporary Cases, Emerging Approaches and Critical Perspectives
The Transformative Justice Institute (TJI) invites researchers and scholars to contribute to a new blog series on contemporary examples, practices and debates in transformative justice.
Across different contexts, communities, social movements, institutions and governments are seeking ways to address the legacies and ongoing effects of colonialism, conflict, racial injustice, displacement, gendered violence, economic inequality and other forms of structural harm.
Transformative justice asks how justice can move beyond responding to individual violations and instead address the political, social, economic and institutional conditions that produce and sustain injustice.
For this series, we welcome contributions that examine contemporary cases of transformative justice broadly understood. Contributions may focus on initiatives explicitly described as transformative justice, but we also encourage analyses of practices that pursue structural change without necessarily using this terminology.
Possible themes include
- Reparations and historical redress
- Colonial legacies, decolonisation and Indigenous justice
- Truth commissions, reconciliation and transitional justice
- Community-based and grassroots justice initiatives
- Racial, gender and socio-economic justice
- Environmental and climate justice
- Land restitution, displacement and migration
- Transformative peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction
- Corporate responsibility for historical or contemporary harms
- Restorative, abolitionist and community accountability approaches
- Memory, education and cultural practices as forms of transformation
We are particularly interested in contributions that critically examine questions such as:
What makes a justice initiative genuinely transformative? Who defines transformation? How can justice processes address structural inequalities rather than only individual harms? What are the possibilities and limitations of transformative justice in practice?
We especially welcome contributions focusing on the Global South, Indigenous communities, postcolonial contexts and perspectives that remain underrepresented in mainstream justice scholarship.
Who can contribute?
The call is primarily directed at doctoral researchers, postdoctoral researchers, and early- and mid-career scholars working across disciplines including political science, law, peace and conflict studies, sociology, anthropology, international relations, development studies, gender studies, Indigenous studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and human rights.
We also welcome contributions from practitioners whose work is strongly grounded in research.
Format and submission
Blog posts should be approximately 1,200–1,800 words and combine rigorous analysis with accessible writing for an interdisciplinary audience.
Interested contributors should submit:
- A proposed title
- An abstract of approximately 200–300 words
- A short biography of approximately 100 words
- Institutional affiliation, where applicable
Deadline for proposals:
Please send proposals to info@thetji.org with the subject line:
TJI Blog Series – Transformative Justice in Practice
Selected authors will be invited to submit a full contribution. All contributions will be editorially reviewed prior to publication on the Transformative Justice Institute website.
Through this series, TJI aims to create a space for critical, interdisciplinary and internationally diverse perspectives on how justice can move beyond addressing past harms toward transforming the conditions that allow injustice to persist.
