Transitional justice and 'local' justice

Abstract

Justice is a complex, elusive and essentially contested concept intimately bound up with context-specific history and culture, finding a diversity of forms and expressions across the globe. Yet that diversity has not always been readily apparent in transitional justice initiatives intended to address legacies of large-scale human rights abuses. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the possibilities of using ‘local,’ ‘traditional,’ or ‘non-Western’ modalities of dispute resolution, reconciliation, truth telling and retributive justice to address legacies of abuse. While the use of these tradition-based initiatives has at times been innovative and held out some promise of increased effectiveness and perceived legitimacy, it has also generated many controversies. For example, local or traditional justice and reconciliation practices may clash with international human rights standards; they may be ill adapted for the context of mass atrocities that spill over porous borders of culture and the nation state; they may be imposed on local communities much like any other post-conflict justice initiative; and they are often filtered through the prism of local politics and historic power disparities, creating the potential to be more repressive than emancipatory. This chapter will explore the general promises and pitfalls of such tradition-based initiatives, using experiences from Rwanda, Uganda and East Timor as examples. I argue that we must be careful not to romanticize local justice; yet at the same time, transitional justice scholars, practitioners, and policy makers ignore local preferences and conceptions of justice at their own peril. While greater use of local modalities of justice will require a fairly robust ‘margin of appreciation’ and acceptance of a degree of legal pluralism that may make some international human rights lawyers uncomfortable, striking a better balance between global and local modalities of justice is ultimately required if we are to make transitional justice into more of a true global project.