Lo imposible demora un poco más.

Alicia Partnoy said it on a screen, early in the day, while we sat in Kathmandu listening to a woman describe Argentina’s mega trials- the large criminal proceedings that, decades after the military dictatorship, gathered together the cases of people who had been disappeared.

She was telling us about the small towns. In those places, she said, families had stopped believing there was any point in testifying. Why testify? Why tell them, again, that someone was taken? Nothing is going to happen now. And yet nearly fifty years later, survivors, relatives, and children of the disappeared are taking the stand. Judges are listening. Perpetrators are being sentenced.

“The children of the disappeared have a saying,” Alicia told us. “The impossible takes a little longer. Lo imposible demora un poco más.“

Alicia survived enforced disappearance under the dictatorship and has spent the decades since as a writer and an activist. I wrote the phrase down immediately, in the margin of my notebook already full of Nepali names. I thought of how long people had waited but also what had survived the waiting from the testimonies, memories, evidences, and the stubbornness of one generation after another to keep asking the same question until somebody was finally required to answer it.

I came into this summer as a student of institutions.

Like many people who study international relations, I had learned to think about justice through mechanisms such as courts, truth commissions, prosecutions, reparations, legal reform. I had a checklist in mind. “Is the commission independent? Does the enabling law comply with international standards? Have perpetrators been prosecuted? Has the state acknowledged what it did?” 

These questions do matter. Accountability matters and criminal justice matters, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in a country where not a single conflict-era case has produced a verdict through the transitional justice process. But this summer, this checklist has started to feel quite incomplete. A checklist tells you whether a mechanism is working but does not tell you whether it is working for anyone.  

Working with the Center for Human Rights and Victims of Violations (CHRV), I have spent a lot of time listening to people who have been waiting for justice for almost twenty years. And when people talk about justice, they are not always talking about a courtroom. They talk about knowing what happened to someone they loved. About where the body is. About having their suffering acknowledged. About remembering. About making sure their children know what happened. About not having the people they lost reduced to a number in a report.It made me wonder: what does justice mean when even a verdict cannot give you back what was taken?

I also started thinking about the language of transitional justice: victim, survivor, conflict-affected, eligible. These words sound technical, but they are not neutral. They determine who is recognized, who receives something, and sometimes, whose loss is told it does not qualify. A process can be functioning exactly as it was designed to and still not see people. I thought about this again when we met with Pratik Karki, a Gen Z activist and advocate. Pratik was three years old when he lost both his parents. His father was a Maoist leader; his mother, also in the combatant force, was captured by the army. 

What does justice mean to someone who did not experience the war in the same way their parents did, but grew up with its consequences?

His answer was not the one I expected. “Hope for justice changes with generation, because the need we have in our life also decides what justice means,” he told us. “Our generation doesn’t want economic compensation. We are focused on the way our parents will be looked at.”

I keep returning to that last sentence. What he is asking for is not a payment or a settlement. It is a question of standing, how his parents are named, remembered, and understood by the country they died in. No compensation scheme is built to deliver that. Neither, on its own, is a courtroom.  

We talk often about intergenerational trauma. But this summer has made me think about something else too: intergenerational resistance. The violence crossed generations. But so did the struggle for justice. Perhaps that is what we sometimes miss when we think about transitional justice as a process with a beginning and an end. A commission finishes its mandate. A law is passed and a trial concludes. But families continue living with what happened.

And their children inherit something too. They inherit photographs and stories. Sometimes they inherit silence. They inherit questions nobody answered. But they can also inherit the determination to keep asking those questions. That changes how I think about memory. I used to see memorialization as something that came after justice. As though first we establish the truth, then prosecute, and finally remember.

Now I am not so sure. Sometimes remembering is what keeps justice possible. A testimony recorded today might become evidence decades from now. A photograph kept in someone’s home might eventually enter an archive. A list of names kept by hand, because no institution was keeping one, might turn out to be the most reliable record that exists. A child who grows up hearing the story of a disappeared parent might one day become the lawyer, journalist, researcher, or activist who refuses to let that story disappear too.

This is why I keep returning to Alicia’s words. “Lo imposible demora un poco más.” 

I don’t hear them as a promise that if we wait long enough, justice will eventually arrive. There is nothing inevitable about justice. Argentina’s trials did not happen simply because fifty years passed. They happened because people spent those fifty years searching, documenting, marching, testifying, remembering, and refusing to give up.

The impossible did not simply take longer. People kept it possible for longer.

That feels important in Nepal, almost twenty years after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. More than sixty-three thousand complaints have been registered with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and over three thousand with the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons. None have been resolved.

No survivor should be asked to patiently wait another twenty or fifty years. But time passing does not make their demands less urgent. And many of the people who filed those complaints have already died waiting. Perhaps the responsibility for carrying those demands cannot belong only to those who experienced the conflict themselves.

Courts matter. Accountability matters. But so do memory, recognition, dignity, and the ability of people to tell their own stories. And so do the generations that come after.

Maybe the question for those of us who inherited a country shaped by a war we were too young to fully remember is not only, ‘When will justice come?’

It is also: What are we going to do to keep its possibility alive?