Victim participation is at the heart of transitional justice debates. However, a victim-centred approach that looks into the impact of participation on the victims specifically remains absent in practice. The recent Tunisian transitional justice experience provides the perfect context to examine mechanisms of victim participation and the effects of that participation on the victims. These issues will be addressed by combining participatory ethnographic methods with process tracing. By focusing on the Tunisian case, I expect this research to make a contribution to a largely understudied topic in transitional justice debates.