Conclusions : learning from the Tunisian experience

The spirit that drove the Tunisian revolution of January 2011 remains alive in the activism of movements around the country that are developing new strategies and finding new hope in the fight for justice. While some of them explicitly seek to mobilize the normative appeal of the transitional justice discourse to further their cause, others do not reference the language of a transitional justice explicitly, even if their claims could logically be framed as demands for transformative justice. This suggests that resistance to standardized transitional justice approaches coexists with a reliance on the language and mechanisms of transitional justice. Transitional and other justice discourses are in constant interaction with each other, and which one is adopted depends, too a large extent, on the intentions, resources, repertoires of action and access of those involved. This dynamic interaction between innovative and standardized transitional justice, and between various kinds of justice discourses and claims-making more generally, offers a dynamic picture of Tunisian’s ongoing struggle for justice. These various initiatives are an example, both for practitioners and scholars, about how the struggle for justice requires activism in a range of spaces, both the formal and those that start from the capacity of citizens to demand change that will improve their lives, rather than from the proceduralism of institutions