This chapter discusses the limits of the transitional justice paradigm in post-genocide Guatemala. The authors critically and reflexively analyse their experiences accompanying diverse groups of Mayan women protagonists who testified in truth-telling processes and trials and organised in defence of their rights. Protagonists have reframed their engagement in these processes to centre their lives, cosmovision and knowledges, defining resilience as ‘resistance, persistence, permanence, strength and determination’. The chapter takes up Eve Tuck’s challenge of a desire-based versus a damage-centred framework and Karen Barad’s theorisation of agential realism and ethico-onto-epistem-ology, wherein ethics, knowing and being are intertwined. It also draws on the work of Mayan women authors and activists who emphasise the gendered integrality of land and body in resisting violence. The chapter documents some of the multi-systems and relational approaches to Mayan resilience that are rooted in an integral, collective relationship of land-body-territory, a pluriverse that disrupts Western dualisms of nature and culture, human and non-human, knowing and being, that are the result of ongoing colonial violence and dispossession. The chapter argues for a conception of historical justice that supports Indigenous people’s self-determination on their lands and through their livelihoods grounded in their own cosmovision.

The introduction sets out the general context, motivation, and contribution of the book. It describes its three-fold purpose: to collect insider accounts of high-level delegates, to analyse the factors that shaped the negotiations, and to identify practical lessons learned. It argues that the book makes signicant contributions to the academic literature, extending our understanding of multilateral negotiations, not only relating to the Paris Agreement, but to other climate negotiations and multilateral negotiations more generally. The chapter also discusses key practical lessons, describes the structure of the book, and provides short summaries of the individual chapters.

This chapter focuses on the village of Ahmići in Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the Bosnian war, a massacre in the village resulted in the deaths of more than 100 Bosniak men, women and children. Drawing on fieldwork carried out in July 2019, the chapter argues that while many interviewees demonstrated resilience simply through everyday acts of getting on with and rebuilding their lives, Ahmići cannot be accurately described as a resilient community – the sum of its parts – because it has not dealt with what happened in 1993 as a community. A crucial reason for this is the existence of multiple systemic factors – including the politicisation of the Bosnian war, the absence of a cross-ethnic narrative and divided school systems – that have not allowed the community to come together as one and rebuild social connections. It demonstrates that transitional justice work – particularly the trials that took place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – further contributed to entrenching inter-ethnic divides. The chapter accordingly calls for a social ecological reconceptualisation and reframing of transitional justice, operationally linking this to adaptive peacebuilding.

Xie Zhenhua shares a perspective from China on the ingredients of the negotiations process that led to the Paris Agreement. As the Special Representative for Climate Change Affairs in the Ministry of Environment and Ecology, Xie had a seat at the table in almost all critical negotiation moments that led to the parties “writing history”. He specifies a “historical, fundamental and indispensable contribution” by China to the Agreement. The Chinese-US cooperation in preparatory talks illustrates this role. Their two joint statements in the year leading up to Paris, covering critical issues such as differentiation and transparency, created further momentum and added to the final text of the Agreement. Xie highlights the intense outreach by the French Presidency and their sincere openness to parties’ concerns, the close China-US collaboration to resolve final blockages at the COP, the active brokering by China with other major countries on finance at the COP, Chinese contributions to the last-minute managing of the “shall-should” incident, and the close coordination of developing country coalitions within BASIC and G77+China.

Five years ago, nations of the world adopted the Paris Agreement, a covenant of hope with the people of the world. It was a remarkable achievement, a milestone for multilateralism – a declaration that humanity could and would stand united and address the most significant threat to its collective future. The excitement arising from its adoption was palpable. After all, history shows that the world succeeds together when the world works together. Multilateralism is how nations, united, cured polio, eradicated smallpox, began to repair the ozone layer and more.

The conclusion ties together the framing of obscenity in how we evaluate corpse politics. It draws out five key points. First, dead bodies are vital matter, and examining dead bodies can not only shed light on cultural contexts, but it also blurs and complicates previous approaches to visuality and materiality. Second, dead bodies are inscribed with the workings of statecraft. The process of visually manifesting and narrativizing particular dead bodies is a complex social, cultural, and political process that is worth looking at. Third, what counts as obscene is a social construction and graphicness serves particular political ends. Fourth, obscene death is often characterized using the language of the extreme, the exceptional, and at times the unrepresentable. We should be asking ourselves what politics this state of exception serves, particularly about how images can both sustain and resist particular political orders. Lastly, the conclusion examines the idea of ethical witnessing, seeking to complicate the picture often painted of it, and reflect on what it means to write a book on corpse politics and the visceral experiences it often involves.

Tyranny’s lengthy history in European debate lends itself to a linear narrative, and this chapter inserts, into that frame, debates over tyranny from archaic Greece to the contemporary era. Linearity often presents a false picture of continuity, progression and coherence, none of which can be bestowed upon tyranny. Rather, there are controversies and contingencies: the rise and fall of empires, the emergence of the Catholic Church, colonialism, constitutionalism, democracy and individual and collective roles contribute to contemporary tyranny’s complexity. Progressing through a history of Western thought – including its imperialism – highlights how changing attitudes towards governance affected accounts of tyranny. This account reveals how Roman hatred of monarchs, attitudes towards gender, the invention of race, the emergence of contemporary democracy and consequent concerns over majority tyranny demonstrate a consistent concern built into a European tyrannical theory subsequently projected onto the rest of the world.

This chapter reflects on the implications of resilience thinking for transitional justice as a transformative process that contributes to adaptive peacebuilding. It discusses how the concept creates space for new thinking about transitional justice and the potential dangers and opportunities afforded by a resilience approach. As part of this analysis, the chapter provides a critical appraisal of the overall approach to transitional justice that has dominated the field, considering transformative justice as an alternative perspective that challenges the hegemonic politico-legal, state-based, backward-looking retributive framework. It argues that resilience thinking supports a greater focus on psychosocial, community-based, forward-looking restorative approaches to transitional justice, consistent with the transformative turn in the field. It demonstrates this by exploring different understandings of justice, how they are pursued in the context of transitional justice and what they mean for building resilient societies after mass violence and human rights violations. The chapter further examines how various transitional justice mechanisms might contribute to individual, community and systemic societal resilience, while also recognising their limitations.

This edited volume set out to explore how resilience, adaptive peacebuilding and transitional justice can help societies recover after collective violence. To do so, it examined diverse societies across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East that have experienced, or are continuing to experience, violence. The eight case studies – Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), Rwanda, Uganda, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Colombia, Guatemala and Palestine – provide in-depth conceptual and empirical analyses of resilience and adaptive peacebuilding in a range of transitional justice settings. This final chapter will reflect on what we have learned from the cases covered in this volume. In particular, it will discuss how they enrich our understanding of the concepts of resilience, adaptive peacebuilding and transitional justice, and what they tell us about the complex ways that resilience and adaptive peacebuilding manifest in transitional and post-conflict settings. The chapter begins with a discussion of adaptive peacebuilding and resilience in transitional justice contexts.

Across the works of William Blake Urizen is at once Jupiter, Jehovah, an Assyrian warrior and George III.1 Urizen uses guises of temperance, prudence, justice, fortitude and, occasionally, madness, to preserve his power.2 Urizen employs an array of tyrannical techniques but in each manifestation is a tyrant. Orc confronts Urizen in each of these guises, challenging tradition and nostalgia with revolution and revival. But the cycle of tyranny and tyrannicide must end, and we only find a resolution in a new order unrestrained by nostalgia for former tyrannical structures. Nostalgia for a history ensconced in authority and power must be replaced by a broad and complex public sphere filled with contestation and a governance order that heeds and responds to those it governs. To end Urizen’s tyrannical authority, we must pose unaskable questions. This book has therefore posed one such question: does tyranny lurk within the global legal order? The answer is yes. International law is not uniquely immune from tyranny. But having made that determination, international law must remove itself from any nostalgia for its (tyrannical) past and entrench contestation into a novel structure that takes both the scale(s) of its operation and its embeddedness into the everyday lives of individuals as fundamental to its self-understanding.

Former Bolivian Minister of Development Planning Rene Orellana Halkyer provides the perspective of the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDC), one of the most influential groups of developing-country parties in the Paris Agreement negotiations including powerful voices such as China, India, and Saudi Arabia. The chapter details the group’s ideology, key demands, and dynamics. Like a Russian doll, the group incorporates various national and sub-group positions, nested within the G77+China. Less powerful developing countries that may otherwise have had little influence were able to use the LMDC’s political clout to amplify their demands and achieve gains in the text. Orellana recount the “battles of wording” in which the mark of the LMDC can be seen in the outcome of COP 21 and reflects on the importance of normative discourse for a group that sees itself as “the representative of the voices that call for a more equitable world”. His account includes fascinating examples of how the practice of “making a wave” in plenary combines power politics and external events with mastery of the negotiation process through the medium of normative discourse to shift negotiation outcomes.

In the aftermath of Democratic Kampuchea and the civil wars that preceded and succeeded it, victims have rebuilt their lives, demonstrating a desire and capacity to survive in the face of extreme hardship. This chapter explores resilience in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Using a social ecological lens, it examines how various systems – and in particular political, legal and economic systems – interact to provide resources that enable and foster resilience among victim populations. It also demonstrates, however, that these systems, individually and in interaction with each other, often remove resources or even undermine resilience. Within this systemic structure, the chapter analyses how transitional justice work in Cambodia has affected resilience. Focused specifically on the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, it argues that while the tribunal has the potential to contribute to resilience (and does for some victims), its design and procedures constrain it in this regard, even inadvertently reinforcing broader marginalising systemic dynamics. The key point is that national actors in Cambodia recognise that they can gain significant advantages through corrupt practices and autocratic power, and thus they have used transitional justice strategically to undermine peacebuilding.