Re-Imagining Customary Justice Systems: Interrogating Past Assumptions and Entertaining New Ones

In the early 2000s, the justice community of practice began to examine the role of customary justice systems in advancing development. This triggered a wave of research by policy and programming agencies, aimed at crafting a narrative for engagement and identifying entry points. The decades of programming that followed closely reflected these research outcomes. This paper revisits this research by comparing key findings to a dataset of 3894 interviews conducted by the Terre des hommes Foundation (Tdh) with 259 customary actors in Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Burkina Faso, the West Bank and the Gaza strip. While the data supports the validity of some research findings, others are contested, suggesting a disconnect between how the programming community believes CJS operate, and how they operate in practice. The implications for programming agencies and those intended to benefit from reforms are discussed, as well as lessons for programmatic research more generally.