From the ground up: local turn, citizenry voice, and agency in Zimbabwe’s national peace and reconciliation process

Over the past decades, affected citizens’ agential power and influence in shaping truth and reconciliation processes have become a topic of intense interest among scholars and researchers of transitional justice. The existing scholarship examines the role, influence, and inhibiting factors that undercut efforts by victims and bystanders to unearth historical truth and to realise peace, closure, and restorative justice. While this is an enriching academic endeavour, transitional justice issues are more complicated in deeply divided societies emerging from the remnants of egregious human rights violations and episodes of violent conflict. Joining this conversation, this article examines the aspect of ‘local turn’ in Zimbabwe, specifically exploring the primacy of citizens’ perspectives and agency in shaping the contemporary national peace and reconciliation process. The article contends that locally grounded transitional justice processes that give salience to bottom-up approaches are a prerequisite for building sustainable peace. Such an empirically and locally driven contextualisation of transitional justice has a heavy analytical purchase, which helps to deepen our understanding of the intricacies and complexities of utilising the local turn in settings where incumbents circumscribe and water down any efforts to realise genuine reconciliation. The study relies on qualitative research methodologies, including data gathered through interviews and secondary sources.