ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on actors who resist, often designated as “spoilers” in the transitional justice literature, but who offer a valuable analytical window into the ways transitional justice can be reimagined. It draws on a case study of Côte d’Ivoire, where supporters of the former president have been labelled as spoilers of transitional justice. The chapter aims to show how analysing “resistance” as socially constructed can point to the necessarily incomplete nature of “knowing” in transitional justice contexts. The limits of Ouattara’s reconciliation, based on economic recovery and stability through decisive action from the centre of presidential power, will be tested, as will the limits of a hastily completed and certainly limited transitional justice process. The production of knowledge on and for transitional justice is not a practice that different actors can engage in equally for “only a particular set of people is able to shape the research agenda which in turn informs policies that shape the world”.
