Recently, proliferating discourses on autochthony and indigeneity have been noted as the flip-side of globalization. Against this backdrop, this article synthesizes insights from studies of nationalism and research on autochthony, explaining how identity formations literally ‘take place’ by conceptualizing ‘autochthony’ — the proclaimed ‘original’ link between individual, territory and group — as the root phenomenon. Two causal logics underlying this autochthonous ethnicity are distinguished, which honour time differently: ‘individualized autochthony’ links the individual, territory and group in such a way that shared culture/descent follow from place of birth/residence within the same present, whereas ‘collectivized autochthony’ inverts this causality on the basis of continuously evoking the same past. The article concludes by distinguishing between ‘indigeneity’ and ‘nationalism’ as alternative modes for targeting the state: whereas indigeneity refers to cases of autochthony that demand special entitlements from the state, nationalism denotes such cases that aim for the very entitlement of the state itself.
Since the end of the Cold War, political new beginnings have increasingly been linked to questions of transitional justice. The contributions to this collection examine a series of cases from across the African continent where peaceful 'new beginnings' have been declared after periods of violence and where transitional justice institutions played a role in defining justice and the new socio-political order. Three issues seem to be crucial to the understanding of transitional justice in the context of wider social debates on justice and political change: the problem of 'new beginnings', of finding a foundation for that which explicitly breaks with the past; the discrepancies between lofty promises and the messy realities of transitional justice in action; and the dialectic between logics of the exception and the ordinary, employed to legitimize or resist transitional justice mechanisms. These are the particular focus of this Introduction.
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