Foundational justice: a strategy for peace in the Horn of Africa

This memo identifies the concept and practice of foundational justice as a response to violent conflict and transactional politics in the Horn of Africa, based on Conflict Research Programme (CRP) research. It argues that international peacebuilders and scholars should learn from and robustly support legal and civic activism during protracted conflicts, including efforts to combat everyday violations, reform justice practices, and challenge impunity for atrocities. It proposes a shift of priorities. Firstly, there is a need to place concerns about justice consistently at the core of peacebuilding programmes and related research agendas. Secondly, there is a need to connect and reorientate approaches based on rule of law and transitional justice that typically concentrate on institutions at the national level and reproduce a state-building logic either explicitly or implicitly. Foundational justice is concerned with advancing more flexible, networked, and negotiated approaches driven ‘from below.’