A critique of law’s violence yet (never) to come: United Nations’ transitional justice policy and the (fore)closure of reconciliation

Abstract

'Today,' writes Doxtader, 'there are signs that transitional justice aims to convert - with disturbing fervor - the constitutive and agonistic quality of reconciliation into a demand (if not a command) for the adversarial, a commitment to the (prior) definition and application of a rule of law.' Doxtader's basic aim is to reflect on this turn against reconciliation's 'turning right about,' and, in his own terms, - to plot at least one of the ways in which reconciliation's place has been largely closed and then foreclosed from the premises and promises of transitional justice. Taking the United Nations as his case study, and especially a number of its policy documents and debates that have appeared over the last decade, Doxtader traces the UN's erasure and expressed aversion to reconciliations - unaccountable-ambiguity. In concluding, Doxtader turns to the question of how the institution's case for standardizing the language of transitional justice recognizes the rule of law at the expense of misrecognizing the law's rule of recognition, 'that is, the fully transitional problem of how to constitute the grounds of the law's power in the wake of violence, including legal violence.' More than simple oversight, for Doxtader, the UN's presumption against reconciliation points directly to its importance - a potential for words that stand before the law and compose a critique of how the law's violence may preclude precisely the claiming of human rights that transitional justice policy presents as it ultimate warrant.