Transitional Justice Research Articles

Do apologies promote the reintegration of former combatants? Lessons from a video experiment in Colombia

Transitional justice practices frequently involve public apologies where former combatants confess their wrongdoings and ask for forgiveness, with the underlying assumption that such displays facilitate the reintegration of ex-combatants into society. However, little is known about the public response to ex-combatant apologies. In this article, we investigate the causal effect of an armed group apology on attitudes toward ex-combatant reintegration in Colombia. Our study builds on a novel experiment implemented in Meta, a conflict-ridden department of Colombia. The experiment entailed exposing a subset of participants to a video in which a former rebel group leader apologizes for violent acts committed by their armed group during the civil war. To examine the extent to which external actors influence the effectiveness of apologies, we incorporated third-party ‘encouragements to forgive’ (endorsements) in two additional treatment conditions. Our analysis demonstrates that, on average, participants do not exhibit higher reintegration attitudes when exposed to the apology, regardless of third-party endorsements. However, the absence of a treatment effect is not due to an indifference to the apology. In an exploratory heterogeneity analysis, we show that the apology induces negative effects on some indicators of reintegration attitudes among participants that did not support the peace agreement. This finding aligns with qualitative data gathered in a follow-up survey, which indicates that opponents of the peace agreement generally describe negative emotional responses to the FARC-EP apology. The results call for a reconsideration of unchallenged prescriptions of public apologies after conflict.

Perpetrators as Victims? Inclusivity and Proximity in Post-Genocide Cambodia and Rwanda

ABSTRACT In post-genocide Cambodia and Rwanda, low-level perpetrators often identify as victims of the genocidal regimes alongside those they tortured and killed. However, state and societal responses to these claims appear to have varied dramatically. In Cambodia, the government and civil society organizations seem to view former Khmer Rouge cadres’ claims to victim status as socially acceptable and politically useful, while in Rwanda, the government and civil society organizations have firmly rejected perpetrators’ efforts to claim space as victims. What accounts for these different societal responses in Cambodia and Rwanda? At present, there is ample literature on how authoritarian government actors in both contexts have shaped their nation’s post-genocide transitional justice responses to prevent future bloodshed, while simultaneously reinforcing their regimes’ sometimes tenuous political legitimacy. However, this article offers complementary insights by exploring two otherwise under-researched factors that we argue further inform these polar-opposite reactions to perpetrators’ claims to victim status: (1). post-genocide governments’ offers of inclusivity in defining who is part of each nation’s ideal post-genocide ingroup; and (2). the social proximity of perpetrators and their victims during and after the genocides. Our focus on inclusivity and social proximity related to the Cambodian and Rwandan genocide advances scholarly understandings of the various factors that shape government and social responses to perpetration in the aftermath of genocide internationally.

Attributing Responsibility to Big Tech for Mass Atrocity: Social Media and Transitional Justice

Big Tech companies such as Meta, the owner of Facebook, are increasingly accused of enabling human rights violations. The proliferation of toxic speech in their digital platforms has been in the background of recent episodes of mass atrocity, the most salient of which recently transpired in Myanmar and Ethiopia. The involvement of Big Tech companies in mass atrocity raises multiple normative and conceptual challenges. One is to properly conceptualize Meta’s responsibility for the circulation of toxic speech. On one view, endorsed by the corporation itself, Meta can be absolved from any significant share of responsibility for these atrocities because toxic speech is the speech of some (rogue) users, hosted but neither created nor endorsed by the company; if anything, Meta is responsible for failing to anticipate and swiftly remove that speech. I will argue that this view is misleading, as it misses the underlying forces crafting toxic speech. Meta’s business model relies on what one might call the algorithmic capture of attention, which it achieves by manipulating its users and by creating an environment in which manipulative practices of some users thrive over others. This fact alone turns the company into a co-creator of toxic speech rather than a mere conduit of the toxic speech of others. As a result, it is safe to claim that Meta bears significant causal responsibility and sufficient moral responsibility for the dissemination of toxic speech, such that it justifies its inclusion in transitional justice processes and grounds its moral obligation to act in ways that advance these processes.

Impunity in Nepal from a Social Protection Lens

This study aims to promote stakeholder solutions to the current state of affairs in Nepal, which has prevailed since the end of the armed conflict in 2006. The study argues that delayed justice in the cases of grave human rights violations that occurred during the armed conflict between the Maoist party and the Government of Nepal is closely associated with the accountability of the then-conflicting parties. The lack of the legislature’s engagement and the Government’s reluctance to address the recommendations of the Supreme Court on transitional justice-related instruments have prolonged the end of impunity and guaranteed social protection of the victims’ families. Upon reviewing the literature on human rights violations, this study concluded that accountability had been impeded by the fragmented conflicting parties, who ignored the victims' and their families’ concerns about justice and social protection. The Government, on the other hand, neglected truth seeking and therefore failed to ensure justice, including in the provision of reparations and standardised institutional reform. The current state of the country’s transitional justice law and unaccountability of state agencies cannot be improved without a collaborative approach and a consultative process with state, non-state actors, victims and their families, as well as the international community.

Revisiting forum shopping: navigating normative pluralism, navigating sentiments

People live their lives and experience the conflicts in which they are involved in the context of competing normative orders. But how do people navigate this normative pluralism? To understand this, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann’s model of ‘forum shopping’ and ‘shopping forums’, derived from an ethnographic analysis of conflict resolution, remains an indispensable starting point. Building on this approach, I argue that in order to understand the navigation of normative orders more broadly, it is important to bring the analysis of sentiments to the study of normative pluralism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on the International Criminal Court’s transitional justice interventions in northern Uganda, I argue that when confronted with different international, national, religious, and indigenous normative options for dealing with mass violence, people navigate normative pluralism by creating, mobilising, maintaining, and transforming sentiments.

Amnesties as a means of encouraging transition and strengthening the application of IHL in Colombia: The case of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace

Abstract Bearing in mind that the peace process between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Ejército del Pueblo, FARC-EP) has been an important milestone for transitional justice, this article aims to share some of the good practices and achievements of this process, as well as the setbacks and challenges that could be avoided in future peace processes. The article will highlight relevant contributions from the Chamber for Amnesty or Pardon (CAP) such as impacting the resocialization of former FARC-EP members and developing international humanitarian law discussions in relation to war crimes and less serious crimes. Additionally, it will describe some of the main challenges faced by the CAP, such as the high number of applications for transitional benefits that it receives, the high number of proceedings that it supervises, and the security concerns arising from implementing a peace agreement in a country still in conflict.

Seeking balance: The role of Article 6(5) of Additional Protocol II in balancing justice and peace in transitions from armed conflict to peace

Abstract This article explores the role of Article 6(5) of Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions in balancing justice and peace during transitions from armed conflict to peace. It argues that the provision, which encourages the granting of broad amnesties at the cessation of hostilities, requires a re-evaluation of the obligation to investigate, prosecute and punish under international law. By analyzing the legal context and scope of Article 6(5), as well as its application in transitional justice models such as in Colombia, the article highlights how the principle of peace can be prioritized alongside justice without undermining victims’ rights. The discussion critically addresses maximalist interpretations of justice, presenting a nuanced approach that foregrounds restorative justice and the importance of reconciliation in post-conflict societies.

Truth Telling and Reconciliation in the Pacific: Solomon Islands' Experience

Truth-telling was necessary as part of Solomon Islands’ reconciliation and peace-building process following the violent conflict between 1998 and 2003. When Solomon Islands gained constitutional independence from Great Britain in 1978, the architects of independence did not anticipate that the country would be embroiled in a violent conflict 20 years later. This conflict left the national economy in ruins, the nation-state on the verge of disintegration with law and order in disarray and an Australian-led Pacific Islands Forum regional intervention force was deployed in 2003. The Solomon Islands government later established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to address the causes of the conflict and establish sustainable peace. From 2010 to 2012, the TRC facilitated a process of truth-telling that was seen as important to secure reconciliation and peace. The truth-telling process focused on the plight of the victims and perpetrators with limited focus on traumas that were generated due to factors such as governance, socio-economic issues, land alienation and displacement. This article will discuss transitional justice by paying attention to the role of the TRC and the effects that it produced. Given this context, the conversations around truth-telling should recognise the intersection between the colonially prescribed state and Indigenous expressions of sovereignty defined through socio-cultural relationships and protocols.

Purging Disloyal Courts in Democratic Transitions and Judicial Preferences

ABSTRACT∞ In this article, I examine court-purging in democratic transitions through the lens of judicial preferences. Specifically, I address the debate on how court-purging during a democratic transition affects the likelihood of future court-purging. I argue that the prevailing assumption is one of static, sincere judicial preferences. In contrast, I explicitly recognize the role of dynamic judicial preferences and incentives. This recognition suggests that transitional court-purging could be minimal and cautious, while the broader judicial context may eventually achieve the same policy outcomes. The dynamic perspective is crucial for understanding past court-purging strategies and for informing the conceptual debate about the rule of law in transitional justice.

Gender and Transitional Justice: Recognition and Reparations of Wartime Sexual Violence in Kosovo

Gender and Transitional Justice: Recognition and Reparations of Wartime Sexual Violence in Kosovo

Las comisiones de la verdad y los legados coloniales: lecciones desde Colombia (2018-2022)

With its signing of the Havana Peace Agreement in 2016, Colombia sought to end an armed conflict that had lasted more than sixty years and had left nearly nine million victims. The agreement led to the establishment of a transitional justice (TJ) framework, including the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition (CEV). This study identifies how the CEV incorporated the legacies of colonialism into its analytical framework. The research is based on in-depth interviews with twenty scholars specializing in colonialism and/or TJ, nineteen peacebuilders, informal conversations with CEV members, and a review of various volumes of the final report. The findings highlight that the commission adopted a long-term historical perspective, revisiting aspects of Spanish colonialism (including structural racism and the hacienda system as an institution of territorial, political, and economic order) as explanatory factors for the various forms of violence experienced during the armed conflict. Additionally, several volumes of the final report emphasize the ongoing impact of colonial legacies, viewing them more as continuities or “ruins,” using Stoler’s concept (2008). While the possibility of dismantling colonial legacies on a material level due to the CEV’s work is debated, its symbolic significance must be highlighted, especially in a context where the State had sought to erase the colonial past. This article contributes to the emerging literature that examines TJ from a decolonial perspective, providing an empirical analysis of the CEV in Colombia, which we believe can become a key reference for this field.

The Atrato River as a Bearer and Co-creator of Rights: Unveiling Black People’s Legal Mobilization Processes in Colombia

Abstract In 2016, Colombia’s Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as the first water body in Latin America to have its own rights. This article interrogates the historical roots of the judicial decision declaring the river a rights holder. Drawing on my long-term engagement with social organizations as an activist, lawyer, and then researcher, I illuminate the influence of Black people from the Atrato River in the transformation of law in at least three areas: ethnic territorial rights, transitional justice, and river rights. To do so, I combine interdisciplinary theoretical critique with socio-legal research using community-based and autoethnographic approaches to trace the community methods and historical practices of political contestation deployed along the rivers. Thus, I conceptualize how an organic and distinctive style of claiming and creating rights has been constructed in the basin. Moreover, by listening to the voices of the riverine representatives, I argue that the river is a nonhuman existence that has participated in the processes of rights-making in conjunction with local communities and a broader mosaic of allied actors. However, I also outline how legal systems still function to overlook crucial socio-legal claims of marginalized and resistant communities.

The Artistic Demystification of the Communist Regime in Romania

Abstract This article explains the role played by contemporary art evocations of the communist past in the establishment of a more comprehensive memory of the communist regime in Romania. The analysis delineates the three memory frameworks of the communist regime in Romania (official memory, activist memory, and a nostalgic outlook) and contraposes them to the five artistic memory frameworks (Ceaușescu’s portraits, the 1989 revolution, the victims of communism, the portraits of the members of the Securitate, and the communist nostalgia) that have crystallized in the period 2000–2020. Theoretically, the article uses the art and politics of memory focus, which is found at the intersection of the studies of cultural/artistic memory and the role of art in Transitional Justice studies, to propose a critical perspective on contemporary artistic discourses of the communist past in Romania.

‘It Begins with Victoria’ — The Yoorrook Justice Commission & Innovating Transitional Justice for First Nations Australia

‘It Begins with Victoria’ — The Yoorrook Justice Commission & Innovating Transitional Justice for First Nations Australia

Do Trials as Part of Transitional Justice Challenge the Stigma Related to Being Targeted by Serious Human Rights Violations?

Abstract There is often stigma attached to being the victim of state violence, as being targeted by state violence is often seen as proof that a person is guilty. This article discusses whether trials as part of transitional justice can challenge such stigma. Trials can provide a legal truth, through identifying what has happened, who the perpetrators are, and who the victim is. Trials and court hearings are an expression of what societies accept, and when a perpetrator is sentenced it is an expression of solidarity with the victim. The article compares how persons targeted by state violence by former regimes in Argentina and Peru describe and perceive of such stigma, how stigma has changed over time and with contemporary trials. There are important differences between the countries regarding the violent history, the groups targeted by state violence, and the ongoing trials, also regarding the outcome of the trials.

Commissions of inquiry and transitional justice in India: accountability, acknowledgment, and truth in the aftermath of communal violence

ABSTRACT This article examines the contributions made by commissions of inquiry to transitional justice in the aftermath of violent conflict. Drawing on data from India, where commissions of inquiry are routinely instituted in response to episodes of communal violence, it assesses the contributions made by 26 commissions established between 1980 and the present to addressing human rights abuses. The article demonstrates that although some of India’s commissions of inquiry have made concrete contributions to uncovering the truth about human rights violations, acknowledging the rights of victims, and holding perpetrators to account, they have more often served to obscure the truth and avoid accountability for human rights violations. It argues that hey do this both to uphold the legitimacy of the democratic state and to protect powerful actors implicated in perpetrating, inciting, or failing to prevent human rights violations, using strategies of denial, blame shifting, and inaction.

Global Models, Victim Disconnect and Demands for International Intervention: The Dilemma of Decoloniality and Transitional Justice in Sri Lanka

Abstract This article uses Sri Lanka as a case study to impel engagement of decoloniality with transitional justice. It identifies gaps in the literature critical of transitional justice, specifically structural interpretations of power hierarchies, state-centrism and disregard of ethnicity and religion. It thereby uses a decolonial analytical lens on empirical findings from Sri Lanka’s failed transitional justice process to identify and understand continuing colonial power structures, including epistemic coloniality. The empirical findings offer three new insights. First, an ideational, structural and procedural disconnection between victims and the global transitional justice model is noted. The article traces how victim positioning and this disconnection were disregarded in favour of an internationally authoritative, credible and universal model of transitional justice. Second, the ethno-religious challenges to transitional justice, which include its reliance on the state as a neutral provider of justice, are highlighted. The third finding, however, on victim demands for greater international involvement, presents a dilemma to future decolonial consideration of transitional justice. Despite only using decoloniality as an analytical tool, the article nevertheless demonstrates the need for deeper reform, including at the epistemic level, for transformation to occur within the field.

Transitional justice and terrorism: socio-legal reflections on the problem of trials, perpetrator responsibility and accountability

Scholars have only recently begun to link transitional justice frameworks to legal settlements after terror. In the wake of Anders Breivik’s 2011 attacks, Norway has witnessed a series of terror and mass violence events, each followed by extensive legal proceedings. These include the 2019 mosque attack, the 2021 Kongsberg killings, and the 2022 Islamist attack during Oslo Pride week. This article examines these trials as a societal, ongoing process. This research contributes to the field of transitional justice by examining how legal systems grapple with the aftermath of terror in the absence of clear-cut criminal narratives. Focus is given to how we can expand our understanding of the meaning of legal accountability in terror contexts. The central contribution of the article is to problematise the relationship between terror trials as vehicles for perpetrator responsibility, and justice and healing. Starting from the mental health narratives surrounding all the perpetrators, the article suggests that there is a tension between holding terrorists accountable and defining them as patients. To contribute to alternative ways of construing legal accountability, the article puts forward examples of how accountability for terror is being navigated and negotiated in bureaucratic, political, and international legal discourse and practice. The article is part of a special issue honouring the contributions of the late Professor Thomas Mathiesen.

Towards a spectral forensics: spirits as epistemic resources in responses to the dead and missing

ABSTRACT The ‘forensic turn’ in transitional justice has seen technologies of identification, notably DNA, become an essential part of recommended responses to missing and disappeared persons in the afermath of violent conflict. There is now a widespread assumption that these technologies will deliver an incontrovertible ‘forensic truth’ that will instantiate families’ ‘right to know’ the fate of their loved ones and benefit society as a whole. However, in many contexts a lack of technical and financial resources limits the use of such approaches, while in much of the majority world, indigenous techniques, notably those that involve communication with the spirits of the dead, provide an alternative route to understanding the fate and whereabouts of the missing. In this article we introduce the term ‘spectral forensics’ as way to explore approaches to ‘knowing’ the missing that engage with the spirit realm. We engage with empirical evidence to explore the scope and reach of contemporary spectral forensics. We argue that there is much that can be learned from spectral forensics about alternative understandings of truth, justice, and peace, which could avoid over-privileging exhumation and identification models based on international forensic expertise.

A Comparative Study of Democracy in Greece, Spain, and Korea from the Perspective of Transitology - An Exploratory Study on the Correlation Between Consolidation of Democracy and Measures of Transitional Justice

A Comparative Study of Democracy in Greece, Spain, and Korea from the Perspective of Transitology - An Exploratory Study on the Correlation Between Consolidation of Democracy and Measures of Transitional Justice