Decolonization of Postcolonial Africa: A Structural Justice Project More Radical than Transitional Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This article seeks to contribute to the debate as to whether the field of transitional justice can or should take on decolonization as one of its desired goals. I argue that efforts to incorporate decolonization within the normative and functional remit of the field are politically, practically and conceptually untenable. In addition to the high implausibility of the field undertaking self-radicalization within the existing (neo)liberal Euro-American order, transitional justice is based on principles of responsibility and accountability that are fundamentally different from decolonization construed as structural justice. In particular, whereas transitional justice is essentially an intervention to restore the integrity of the existing normative and social order, the decolonization project seeks to interrogate and dismantle some parts of the system being legitimated, if not the entire system. Therefore, framing such a project as transitional justice risks depoliticizing and minimizing its socially transformative essence which is long established in the history of political liberation movements of the postcolony. Although this is a case study of Sierra Leone’s almost 20-year experience of transitional justice, I aim to connect the field with the recent critical turn to the decolonization of postcolonial Africa.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".