Introducing Justicecraft: Political Change Across Space and Time

Scholarship has often compartmentalised issues associated with injustice, political violence, and past wrongdoings. To contextualise questions of political change and justice across time and space, we introduce a dynamic, layered and transversal understanding of these processes. Drawing on Inés Valdez's notion of "justice as a political craft,"we explore situated struggles for change and justice. Coping with injustice is contingent on context-specific conceptual and practical understandings of justice and grounded in particular experiences. Drawing on symbolic sites-the Uprising, the Audience, the Body, the Affect, the Island, and the Map-we highlight a variety of struggles against past, present and future injustices. Struggles for political change arise out of expanding, sometimes exploding, transitional justice knowledge(s). Claims to (in)justice are being made and received in different physical and symbolic sites. We lay out a framework of justicecraft to capture these intricacies, drawing on different conceptual lenses and empirical illustrations.