Post-Conflict and Transitional Justice

Abstract

Transitional justice refers to the range of formal, informal, or grassroots mechanisms deployed by societies emerging from civil war or authoritarian rule to address past human rights violations. These include, but are not limited to, criminal prosecution of perpetrators (see Trials), truth commissions tasked to document patterns of human rights abuses (see Truth Commissions), policies of lustration (or vetting), amnesty laws (see Amnesties), material or symbolic reparations to victims, public apologies, and revision of history textbooks (see Other Policies: Lustration, Apologies, Memorials, History Textbooks). Most often, transitional justice refers to official state policies, yet over the past two decades, there has been an increase in grassroots mechanisms led by civil society, victims groups, and NGOs, thus expanding the scope of transitional justice. Some observers distinguish between the transitional justice policies of post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings. Although certain challenges faced by political elites and victims are comparable across settings, this article focuses on the former. Debates of how to address the violent past are inevitable in societies emerging from conflict, and most hinge on the thorny issue of whether to hold perpetrators accountable or to let bygones be bygones. This, of course, is a perennial dilemma, but with the changing nature of warfare and the normative turn in international politics, such questions have become more prominent. Since the end of the Second World War, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of intrastate wars, marked by more civilian deaths away from battlefields (see Victims and Victimhood). In sharp contrast to previous forms of conventional warfare where the absence of violence was a sufficient condition for the consolidation of peace in times of transition, the higher civilian casualties in contemporary civil wars mean any peaceful transition requires a proactive policy of restoring social relations fractured by violence. In this context, concepts such as national reconciliation (see Reconciliation), truth recovery, and transitional justice have gained currency in the literature of international politics.