Based on discursive analysis, Chapter 3 focuses on the briefs produced in Madrid and the colony to mount the plaintiffs’ case for collective freedom. It examines the meanings of freedom in the Spanish Atlantic and the battery of legal tools, including the rarified one of prescription, deployed in the plaintiffs’ memorials to buttress their case of wrongful enslavement and collective freedom. The case entered unchartered terrain with the claim that belonging to a pueblo constituted a way of enacting and producing freedom collectively, an innovative claim based on notions of corporate belonging in the Spanish Atlantic world especially related to municipal bodies such as pueblos. The chapter parses a distinction between civil and political freedom made in some briefs. Civil freedom was understood in opposition to slavery as personal freedoms that free subjects could enjoy as royal vassals even in the context of colonialism and royal absolutism. Political freedom depended on municipal belonging, the space in which limited self-rule and citizenship could be locally enacted in an absolute monarchy. The chapter draws out the possible normative implications of this claim for Afro descendants at large who, at most, could only enjoy civil freedom rights in the empire.

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.