Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru: Decolonizing Transitional Justice

In 2001, following a generation of armed conflict and authoritarian rule, the Peruvian state created a Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). Pascha Bueno-Hansen places the TRC, feminist and human rights movements, and related non-governmental organizations within an international and historical context to expose the difficulties in addressing gender-based violence.

Her innovative theoretical and methodological framework based on decolonial feminism and a critical engagement with intersectionality facilitates an in-depth examination of the Peruvian transitional justice process based on field studies and archival research. Bueno-Hansen uncovers the colonial mappings and linear temporality underlying transitional justice efforts and illustrates why transitional justice mechanisms must reckon with the societal roots of atrocities, if they are to result in true and lasting social transformation.

Original and bold, Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peruelucidates the tension between the promise of transitional justice and persistent inequality and impunity.

“Cutting-edge and original. Bueno-Hansen reveals the meaning behind the rhetoric of human rights promotion in the aftermath of conflict. Using an approach that articulates gender, ethnicity, and coloniality, she illuminates the impact of human rights-based justice processes on marginalized peoples’ lives.”–Elisabeth Jay Friedman, author of Unfinished Transitions: Women and the Gendered Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936-1996

“This book provides remarkable insights into the overlap and disjunctions between the human rights movement’s response to atrocities involving women, the response of the feminist movement, and the needs of the women who have been harmed. It is an important and nuanced contribution to the literature on the gendered realities of post-conflict societies. Set in Peru, nonetheless it speaks to a universal experience of conflict and its aftermath.”–Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, co-editor of Guantánamo and Beyond: Exceptional Courts and Military Commissions in Comparative Perspective