Knowing What I Know Now: Youth Experiences of Dictatorship and Transitional Justice in the Gambia

This study examines the economic and institutional effects of reparations within a transitional justice framework, using micro-level evidence from The Gambia following the implementation of the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) White Paper. While reparations are widely recognized as a core pillar of transitional justice, their role as economic policy instruments and drivers of institutional legitimacy remains underexplored, particularly in low-income and post-authoritarian contexts. Drawing on public finance theory, institutional economics, and transitional justice scholarship, this study conceptualizes reparations as a multidimensional intervention influencing economic recovery, institutional trust, and satisfaction with implementation. Using primary data from a nationally distributed survey of 746 victims, the analysis employs Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models to estimate the relationship between perceptions of reparations and key outcome variables, controlling for socio-demographic characteristics and victim heterogeneity. The findings reveal that reparations are positively and significantly associated with all three outcome dimensions. However, their impact on economic recovery is moderate, suggesting that compensatory transfers alone are insufficient to fully restore livelihoods. In contrast, reparations have a stronger effect on institutional trust and satisfaction with implementation, highlighting their role as a signal of state accountability and legitimacy. The results further indicate that the effects of reparations are heterogeneous, with stronger impacts observed among low-income individuals and victims with more severe experiences. The study contributes to the literature by reframing reparations as a hybrid economic and institutional policy instrument and providing one of the first micro-level empirical analyses of their effects in an African transitional justice context. The findings underscore the importance of adequate, timely, and inclusive reparations in strengthening both welfare outcomes and institutional legitimacy.

This essay reviews recent developments in transitional justice (TJ) scholarship that represent an emerging corporate turn in TJ. TJ has traditionally focused primarily on states and state-like actors, a movement that has gone hand in hand with the increasing standardization of TJ as a field of practice. Highlighting some of the limits to this model of TJ, scholars have since early 2000s been calling for the need to include economic actors in the TJ system. These four books that have all been published between 2020 and 2022 reflect a new momentum for this movement within TJ scholarship. They all highlight, in different ways, how complimentary innovative mechanisms and creative legal combinations have led and can lead to holding economic actors accountable for past abuse. Corporate accountability has been a blind spot in the increasingly standardized approach to TJ, but this emerging corporate turn represents a possibility to innovating the TJ standard to include “new” actors as subjects of accountability. All books, however, also show that this is far from a straightforward process as it involves transforming the deeply engrained and rigid international law and human rights system, which have usually protected economic elites and focused on states.

Transitional justice scholarship has increasingly focused on participation to critically reflect upon the legitimacy and transformative potential of transitional justice. This article addresses these issues yet through a different vantage point: that of non-participation. It focuses on the case study of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and a particular set of actors: those who continue to face political violence in Cambodia today. Thereby, it engages with the perspectives of those often overlooked in transitional justice for having opted out of the process, but also for putting forward justice claims that exceed the mandate of established transitional justice institutions. This article draws from qualitative fieldwork conducted in Cambodia between 2013 and 2016. It demonstrates the epistemic value of engaging with non-participation in transitional justice. It argues that non-participation in judicial transitional justice processes is inherently linked to the ways in which ordinary citizens experience and understand the law in their everyday life. It further highlights continuities in subjective experiences of political violence, which question discourses that political violence is a time that is past in Cambodia.

ABSTRACTEducation is acknowledged as a component of transitional justice processes, yet details about how to implement education reform in postconflict societies are underexplored and politicized [King, Elisabeth. 2014. From Classrooms to Conflict in Rwanda. New York: Cambridge University Press]. Local and international actors often neglect the complicated nature of education reform in postconflict societies undergoing transitional justice processes [Jones, Briony. 2015. "Educating Citizens in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Experiences and Contradictions in Post-war Education Reform." In Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Lessons from the Balkans, edited by Martina Fischer, and Olivera Simic, 193–208. New York: Routledge. Transitional Justice]. The role of the diaspora in transitional justice has been increasingly explored as a participatory transnational actor with influence and knowledge about local dynamics [Roht-Arriaza, Naomi. 2006. The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Haider, Huma. 2008. “(Re)Imagining Coexistence: Striving for Sustainable Return, Reintegration and Reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. ”International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (1): 91–113; Young, Laura, and Rosalyn Park. 2009.“ Engaging Diasporas in Truth Commissions: Lessons from the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission Diaspora Project.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (3): 341–361; Koinova, Maria, and Dženeta Karabegović. 2017.“ Diasporas and Transitional Justice: Transnational Activism from Local to Global Levels of Engagement.” Global Networks 17 (2): 212–233]. This article bridges academic literature about diaspora engagement and transitional justice, and education and transitional justice by incorporating the role of diaspora actors in post-conflict processes. Using empirical data from multi-sited field work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and France, it examines diaspora initiatives which aim to influence local transitional justice processes through translocal community involvement in education and youth policy. It argues that diaspora initiatives can provide alternative and intermediate solutions to the status quo in their homeland, with some potential for contributing to transitional justice and reconciliation processes. Ultimately, diaspora initiatives need support from homeland institutions in order to forward transitional justice agendas in post-conflict societies.

Šiame straipsnyje analizuojama pereinamojo laikotarpio teisingumo studijų būklė, įvertinami atlikti tyrimai, aptariama jų raida, kartu pateikiant atsakymus į kelis probleminius klausimus. Pirmiausia, kas lėmė vyraujančias tyrimų kryptis. Antra, kokios yra esminės šio studijų lauko teorinės bei metodologinės problemos. Trečia, kokių duomenų ir kokio pobūdžio tyrimų šioje srityje vis dar trūksta. Ši analizė grindžiama prielaida, kad tokio pobūdžio akademinė savirefleksija naudinga ne tik patiems pereinamojo laikotarpio teisingumo tyrėjams, bet ir pereinamojo laikotarpio teisingumo strategijas įgyvendinantiems nacionaliniams ar tarptautiniams veikėjams.

“Democratic transitional justice is almost as old as democracy itself,” points out Jon Elster.1 Examples of transitional justice are available from history as early as ancient Greece.2 Elster distinguishes between exogenous and endogenous transitional justice, “the process of transitional justice may be either initiated by the new regime or carried out under the supervision of foreign power.”3 The distinction between exogenous and endogenous transitional justice processes is now widely accepted in transitional justice scholarship.4 For example, Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne draw on this binary. In defining the terms used in the article Political Economy of Forgiveness, they assert that endogenous transitional justice implies “the administration of justice by indigenous citizens within the transition country.”5 Exogenous transitional justice involves “external, international actors in the administration of justice.”6

This book addresses the effectiveness of transitional justice mechanisms for repairing social cohesion. Truth commissions and reparation programs are implemented worldwide to enhance social cohesion, peace and democracy in post-conflict settings. Most claims about transitional justice measures are, however, normatively and not empirically based.The book questions whether attention from a truth and reconciliation commission can truly change the lives of the violence-affected people and whether monetary compensations or communal projects in form of milk cows can ever truly "repair" the harm suffered. The within-country comparative case study analyzes the effects of the commission and reparation program in Peru. It studies the post-conflict situation and the development of social cohesion in communities affected by the internal armed conflict. Using detailed empirical data this analysis reveals why the "reparation" of social cohesion in Peru was an impossible task. Contributing to a broader understanding of the impact of nationally applied transitional justice instruments in local settings, the book further offers a new framework for analyzing social cohesion as one of the aims of transitional justice processes. Offering a detailed account of transitional justice processes and social cohesion on the micro level, as well as an important analysis of their relationship, this innovative monograph will be invaluable for transitional justice scholars and students, as well as for international political and societal actors who are involved in transitional justice measures.

The early transitional justice scholarship was premised on the notion that a window of opportunity was created by the transition itself, allowing nascent democracies to devise justice tools in order to remedy victims and to consolidate the new democratic order. Grounded in a merger of human rights advocacy and the ‘transition to democracy’ literature of the 1980s and 1990s, transitional justice scholars focused on how newly established democratic governments could use the ‘transitional moment’ to respond to the abuses committed by their repressive predecessors. In so doing, it was assumed that the transition presented both opportunities and limitations to the kind of justice that could be rendered. Since then, however, transitional justice scholarship has developed enormously. Notably, contemporary studies of transitional justice interrogate justice processes aimed at addressing human rights abuses and more broadly the roots of conflict in a myriad of situations not characterized by a liberalizing political transition and the State has come to be seen as only one among several relevant actors relevant for promoting and implementing transitional justice tools. This chapter argues that the move away from viewing transitional justice primarily as the responses of a new democratic regime to abuses committed by a past undemocratic and repressive regime raises profound questions for the understanding of what transitional justice is and what it can achieve, which have not been sufficiently explored in the scholarship. First, the chapter discusses the implications of transitional justice no longer necessarily being confined to a limited ‘window of opportunity’ in time. Second, the chapter discusses the ramifications of transitional justice no longer being reserved for periods of liberalizing political transition. Finally, the chapter examines the consequences of transitional justice occurring at other levels than the State level.

This article analyses the journey of the so-called Izieu telegram – a telegram sent by Nazi perpetrator Klaus Barbie to report the raid of a Jewish children’s home in France to his superiors – from its creation to its use in multiple transitional justice mechanisms, including an international military tribunal, domestic trials in France, and various memorialisation projects. In doing so we apply the concepts of activation and the records continuum approach, both borrowed from archival studies scholarship, to analyse how an individual record becomes continuously recontextualised through its use in transitional justice processes and in the process contributes to those same processes. We conclude by highlighting both the benefits of bringing archival concepts into dialogue with transitional justice scholarship and practice, and the tensions inherent in that endeavour.

This article analyses the journey of the so-called Izieu telegram – a telegram sent by Nazi perpetrator Klaus Barbie to report the raid of a Jewish children’s home in France to his superiors – from its creation to its use in multiple transitional justice mechanisms, including an international military tribunal, domestic trials in France, and various memorialisation projects. In doing so we apply the concepts of activation and the records continuum approach, both borrowed from archival studies scholarship, to analyse how an individual record becomes continuously recontextualised through its use in transitional justice processes and in the process contributes to those same processes. We conclude by highlighting both the benefits of bringing archival concepts into dialogue with transitional justice scholarship and practice, and the tensions inherent in that endeavour.

ABSTRACTWe have limited understanding of how ethnic groups can achieve an agreement on tackling the legacy of war crimes, because transitional justice scholars have been focused primarily on challenges to post-conflict reconciliation. Addressing this gap, we investigate whether contestation over the norm of transitional justice prevents inter-ethnic reconciliation, operationalized by us as reconciliatory discourse. Empirical evidence is drawn from the study of debates conducted by a transnational advocacy network (RECOM), which proposes a regional fact-finding commission in the Balkans. Applying text analysis to identify key themes in these debates, we find reconciliatory discourse in those debates where there is norm contestation. Also, the spatial scale of a transitional justice process matters. We identify different patterns of discourse at different levels of debates. Debates containing norm contestation are associated with ethnically centred arguments at the national level, but with sustained scrutiny of proposed solutions at the regional level despite ethnic divisions.

We have limited understanding of how ethnic groups can achieve an agreement on tackling the legacy of war crimes, because transitional justice scholars have been focused primarily on challenges to post-conflict reconciliation. Addressing this gap, we investigate whether contestation over the norm of transitional justice prevents inter-ethnic reconciliation, operationalized by us as reconciliatory discourse. Empirical evidence is drawn from the study of debates conducted by a transnational advocacy network (RECOM), which proposes a regional fact-finding commission in the Balkans. Applying text analysis to identify key themes in these debates, we find reconciliatory discourse in those debates where there is norm contestation. Also, the spatial scale of a transitional justice process matters. We identify different patterns of discourse at different levels of debates. Debates containing norm contestation are associated with ethnically centred arguments at the national level, but with sustained scrutiny of proposed solutions at the regional level despite ethnic divisions.

This study investigated the role of mediation in grassroots transitional justice processes. The major aim of the study was to understand the role of mediation in transitional justice processes, ascertaining its effectiveness as a grassroots transitional justice mechanism and how its demand for use in transitional justice can be increased. The study was carried out using action research methodologies, with a mediation project carried out in the Makoni District of Manicaland in Zimbabwe. The mediation project involved community members addressing transitional-justice-related conflicts using mediation as a tool for conflict resolution. The mediators were provided with mediation skills through a training programme and their work was evaluated thrice to ascertain the role and impact of the mediation interventions on transitional-justicerelated conflicts. The project was termed Mediation for Everyday Transitional Justice because it was implemented in a natural community’s daily environment, by local people and for the local communities. The continuing failure of transitional justice mechanisms in Zimbabwe amid continued human rights violations justifies the undeniable value of this study. Zimbabwe’s past transitional justice efforts (since 1980, when the country became an independent republic) failed to build sustainable peace hence the country’s continued relapse into political and socio-economic turmoil. However, with appropriate transitional justice interventions that are built on grassroots-informed processes, sustainable peace is conceivable in Zimbabwe. Mediation, as an alternative dispute resolution process that is both persuasive and non-retributive, offers an interesting opportunity to the practice of transitional justice. The research concluded that the role of mediation in transitional justice is to facilitate truth telling, reparations, healing, and reconciliation among disputants without the need to use national-level transitional justice infrastructures. This means that, at the grassroots level, transitional justice processes can take place without waiting for the statist transitional justice approaches. However, in cases where the past human rights violations being addressed are tied to structural violence, driven from outside the community, local mediation processes may not be possible without the consent, cooperation, and willingness of those who sustain such conflicts. In addition, mediation cannot play any significant role in enabling prosecutorial justice, memorialisation, and institutional reforms at the grassroots level. Prosecutorial justice cannot be achieved because perpetrators can withdraw quickly when possibilities exist to be held criminally accountable for past human rights abuses. Institutional reforms also require changing governance policies and practices which are issues beyond the control of specific local communities. The study also observed that mediation is an effective tool for grassroots transitional justice issues because it is efficient, it saves time and financial resources, and it can be undertaken by local actors. To increase its demand and use in transitional justice processes at the grassroots level, these is a need to increase communities’ awareness of the importance of mediation in transitional justice, provide mediation-skills capacity-development interventions to potential mediators, and enhance the agency of various mediation actors at the grassroots levels.

The ever-expanding field of transitional justice has, to date, largely overlooked the issue of disability, even though there is growing research on disability and armed conflict. Relatedly, little attention has been given to the accessibility of transitional justice processes. This Policy and Practice Note, the idea for which developed from the author’s own personal experiences and reflections as a transitional justice scholar with a physical disability, points to unexplored synergies between the human rights and social models of disability (reflected within the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities), on one hand, and transitional justice, on the other. It also highlights and discusses three important dimensions of accessibility—processual, contextual and methodological—that could be usefully explored within transitional justice scholarship and practice to give the issue of disability the recognition and prominence that it deserves.

This chapter presents the contemporary understanding involving the foundations or‘ pillars’ of transitional justice (TJ)—namely truth-seeking, prosecution (or ‘accountability), reparations, and institutional reforms or guarantees of non-repetition (including memorialization); an analysis of the genealogy of the evolution of this field; and an examination of various potential interactions between cognitive-behavioural studies and TJ processes. The chapter argues that while TJ theory involves psychological and cognitive processes, TJ scholarship has yet to meaningfully incorporate the results of empirical findings and theoretical insights drawn from cognitive-behavioural studies. More specifically, Teitel and Shankar analyse how existing cognitive schemas impact expectations regarding truth commissions, the influence of witnesses’ memories on criminal prosecutions, the influence of group identity on the perception of reparations, and how certain framing may affect guarantees of non-repetition. The discussion of these four issues is accompanied by some suggestions concerning the design of TJ processes, as well as some observations regarding the potential limitations of using cognitive-behavioural literature to shape TJ processes. The analysis offered of the specific links between TJ pillars and cognitive- behavioural studies should be read as an example of a broad range of possible interrelationships between these two fields.