Beyond the contained critique: structural failure and the redirection of human rights in post-conflict justice

Abstract

This thesis addresses a critical paradox within post-conflict justice: while the human rights framework is treated as the standard pathway to peace, it systematically fails to deliver substantive justice. Moving beyond the “contained critique” of dominant peace-justice, human security, and transitional justice literatures, which conflate structural shortcomings with mere implementation failures, this study asks whether such recurring failures are contingent or structurally built into the framework’s structure. Methodologically speaking, combining doctrinal legal analysis with theoretically informed comparative readings (Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo) while applying simultaneously decolonial, feminist and securitisation theories, the study reveals that these studies converge in the same underlying problem. Each lens reveals the recurring institutional tendencies, from market-compatible governance, the bureaucratic management of gendered vulnerability, to the prioritisation of state stability over accountability. This produces a “virtual peace” that secures the absence of direct violence while leaving oppressive material and political conditions intact. Crucially, this thesis analyses genuine exceptions to demonstrate this systemic failure as a structural tendency rather than an immutable determinism. Colombia’s 2016 accord and Latin American domestic prosecutions demonstrate that the framework’s defaults can be displaced. Such displacement requires organised, grassroots mobilisation from below, as well as reciprocal accountability, under which actors can turn rights language against its own default biases. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that the human rights framework is structurally colonial, patriarchal, and securitised, yet it paradoxically constitutes the most viable vocabulary available to be turned against its own exclusions.