PhD Research Project

The doctoral project seeks to examines how civil society tribunals pursue justice and solidarity in contexts of systemic violence and impunity, filling voids left by formal international institutions. Scholarship has largely approached these tribunals through legal lenses, overlooking their role at the intersection of law, politics, social movements, and performative practices. The objective is to demonstrate that only an interdisciplinary approach can capture the tribunal’s potential as counterinstitution. To provide a systematic account of tribunal practice, the project draws on three case studies, each representing one specific tribunal category:

• The 48th Permanent Peoples' Tribunal in Colombia (2021),

• The International Rights of Nature Tribunal –  Yasuní ITT case (2014–2017)

• The Feminist Sarajevo Womens' Court (2015).

The central ambition of the project is to develop a model highlighting shared structures, divergent strategies, and transformative potential across different tribunal categories. Methodologically, the project combines cultural analysis, political theory, critical legal studies, and performance studies, using fieldwork, interviews, archival research, performance analysis and literature review within the framework of situational analysis.

The research aims to (I) conduct a comparative, empirical, and interdisciplinary study of selected exemplary tribunals representing three types (Peoples’ Tribunals, Women’s Tribunals, and Rights of Nature Tribunals); (II) analyze tribunals as processual practices, emphasizing organizational and preparatory phases often overlooked in scholarship, to capture the collective and democratic work behind the scenes; (III) examine how they operate between legal and political critique and prefiguration; (IV) conceptualize tribunals as solidaristic counterinstitutions of soft law; and (V) contribute to their recognition in cultural and legal scholarship by highlighting their creative role in democratizing and transforming law from below.