In 2016, a peace agreement was signed to end the decades-long conflict between the government and rebel insurgents in Colombia — a conflict which saw the deaths of some 220,000 people, and the displacement of five million others.
To repair harms resulting from this time, Colombia has embarked on an innovative program of transitional justice. It’s now seen as a model for other countries that are in the process of restoring justice following periods of human rights violations.
This past summer, Professor Kamari Maxine Clarke and a group of five students visited Cali, Colombia with a view to studying this unique model as part of the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Research Excursions Program (REP), which provides students with opportunities to travel off-campus during the summer term to participate in an instructor’s research project.
Clarke says that historically, transitional justice processes have incorporated several key pillars: prosecution, truth-telling, reparations and accountability. Well-known historical examples include the Truth & Reconciliation Commissions in Canada and South Africa, as well as the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
“But the problem is that many of the state-based approaches to transition are ineffective at best, and don’t address many of the root causes of violence,” says Clarke, Distinguished Professor at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the Faculty of Arts & Science and whose transitional justice research landed her the finalist of the prestigious 2025 SSHRC Impact Award.
“Criminal prosecutions can be effective because they establish norms,” she says. “But what often happens is that people who were displaced from those war torn communities are not the recipients of the type of compensation that can help them to move on with their lives. Instead, a few people are convicted by long trial deliberations, and the cycles of inequality and poverty continue.”
Clarke says the REP, and the larger SummerLab to which it was connected, called Upending Transitional Justice: Rethinking the International Criminal Law, was designed to “think about new models through which to understand what justice is, and what it can be.” It was co-led by Wumi Asubiaro Dada, who completed a postdoctoral fellowship at U of T and joined the University of Guelph's Department of Political Science as an assistant professor this fall.
During the week-long program in Cali, students, scholars, practitioners, artists, community leaders and policymakers convened to explore critical questions around justice in the aftermath of war, ranging from international criminal law, memory and peacebuilding. Participants attended seminars and visited museums and community organizations. They also met directly with members of government, victims of conflict, as well as former combatants connected to earlier rebel groups.
I really love experiential learning, taking what we’ve learned in the classroom and using opportunities to gain a real-world perspective.
“I really love experiential learning, taking what we’ve learned in the classroom and using opportunities to gain a real-world perspective,” says A&S undergrad Irene Wu. “I wanted to look at practical solutions, and ways to engage people in those decisions regarding their livelihoods and their futures.”
Now in her fourth year as a specialist in Peace, Conflict and Justice Studies with a focus on conflict resolution and conflict management, Wu is also pursuing a minor in philosophy with a focus on bioethics as a member of Victoria College.
Art — including music and sculpture — has figured largely in Colombia’s transitional justice effort. Wu was particularly struck by this, citing one particular example: the 13-metre-bronze statue known as the Monument of Puerto Resistencia, built by the people to commemorate those who died during the period of national protests in 2021. Unlike other monuments that glorify politicians or soldiers, it’s a statue that symbolizes the community’s struggle to resist oppression.
One of our main takeaways was this idea of resilience in transitional justice ... and by resilience, I mean this ability and capacity to persist, to adapt and to transform.
“One of our main takeaways was this idea of resilience in transitional justice,” says Wu. “And by resilience, I mean this ability and capacity to persist, to adapt and to transform. It also refers to the act of rebuilding relationships that have been eroded by conflict.”
The monument, funded by local donors and built by construction workers in their spare time, “shows how their memory is used as a way to empower the communities and that the people are still living. I saw how it gave them a new life.”
The REP enabled Fareedah Imam to see the many ways in which transitional justice transcends the idea of crime and punishment.
“Transitional justice isn’t just law,” says Imam, who is completing her fourth year as a member of St. Michael’s College with a double major in economics and public policy and a minor in African studies. “It’s economics, it’s justice, it’s healthcare, it’s science, it’s psychology — it’s many different things.”
Originally from Nigeria, Imam plans to work on socioeconomic policy in an African context after graduation. The REP “widened the way I think about socioeconomics, which is where conflict comes from.”
“Looking at Cali,” she continues, “it wasn’t just that people disappeared. There was land insecurity. There was inequality, unemployment. Even the guerilla fighters, who were enemies of the state, didn’t start out as armed people: they started out as reformers who wanted to see a different kind of system.
We weren’t there to simply take from Colombia, go back to Toronto and write a paper about it. We were there to give, to learn, to reciprocate.
“How do we solve those problems so that people don’t feel the need to start revolutionary groups? And because elections are another form of systems, how do we make democracies work so that they actually do what they’re supposed to?”
As in North American and countries worldwide, Clarke says that Colombia’s justice system has been modelled on colonial principles; however, its transitional justice framework, is trying to do something different and has actively attempted to incorporate Black and Indigenous decolonial methodologies that attend to harm done and focus on reparatory justice.
“When you think about the violence in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and other places where there has been large scale civil wars, there’s often a focus on criminal trials as the key to addressing violence. The opposite has happened in Colombia, and it’s not because the system lacks teeth. It’s because people are insisting that we need to foreground and prioritize those who suffered from that violence and figure out what they need and want, rather than adopting a penal strategy that simply takes the perpetrator of violence and puts them in jail.
“In some cases, what families want is to know what happened to their loved ones. And there’s the right to know — are they dead? What happened to their body? Can I give them a proper burial with integrity?”
Clarke says that one of her course’s foundational principles was to be anti-extractive.
“We weren’t there to simply take from Colombia, go back to Toronto and write a paper about it. We were there to give, to learn, to reciprocate. You know when people are telling you painful stories of loss, that you are there to listen: to hear what they’ve been through but also to bear witness to their loss, and share their hope for a brighter future.”
Wu echoes that sentiment, saying the experience of being present was incomparable.
“Just hearing their stories and seeing the pain in people’s eyes, I think it’s forever ingrained in my soul,” she says. “I think that goes beyond what textbooks can communicate. In academic literature, we tend to quantify people’s experiences and reduce them to numbers. This experience really illuminated how we can bridge that gap.”