Weighing the Costs of Transitional Justice

Abstract

The Costs of Justice: How New Leaders Respond to Previous Rights Abuses. By K. Grodsky Brian . Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. 392 pp., $40.00 (ISBN-13: 978-0-268-02977-7). With The Costs of Justice, Brian K. Grodsky offers critical insight into one of the most fundamental questions underlying the field of transitional justice: namely what are the “primary determinants” (p. 19) within transitional societies that decide the nature of the justice interventions employed by new leaders to respond to gross human rights violations committed by former regimes? Combining theoretical innovations with findings derived from in-depth qualitative fieldwork and a comparative case study analysis of transitional justice decision-making processes in postcommunist states, Grodsky offers a vital contribution to this debate. Accordingly, this is an important new book that will be of major interest to those engaged in the study of transitional justice as well as scholars and practitioners working in the related literatures of political science, human rights, and democratization. The key contribution of Grodsky's book centers on challenging the prevailing wisdom that a transitional society's approach to providing justice to deal with previous human rights violations can be predicted by comparing the “relative power” of old elites complicit in past abuses with that of the new leadership (Huntington 1991; Zalaquett 1992; Huyse 1995). In essence, such arguments hold that where the relative power of members of the old regime allows them to directly influence justice decisions or to potentially …