Transitional Justice and Victim Participation in Cambodia: A World Polity Perspective

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the term “transitional justice” has been commonly used to label approaches that deal with the past. From a world polity perspective transitional justic is based on global norms and offers various methods for coming to terms with macro-criminal wrongdoings. The most recent development in transitional justice was the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). In the article we illustrate the fruitfulness of world polity research by referring to the case of Cambodia, with a special focus on the implementation of victim participation by the ECCC. Our argument is that even if there are particular local conditions for the Cambodian way of dealing with crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge, transitional justice in Cambodia can be seen as an adoption of globally institutionalised expectations of how a state should present itself with respect to its dealing with past human rights violations. We argue that the inclusion of victims in Cambodian transitional justice mechanisms could be seen as a consequence of shifts in the global environment. For that, the shift of seeing genocide and mass murder not only as evil or a fate, but as a violation of individual human rights, is crucial. Even so, we acknowledge the enabling effect that local circumstances had on these developments.