Post-war Justice Research Articles

The absence of absence: of ekphrasis and blind witnessing

The centrality of apparition and disapparition as political manifestation and existential threshold informs enforced disappearance as a political regime that interrupts the existing densities and securities of social visibility in private and public spheres. The author contends that executive power deploys enforced disappearance to amplify its ekphrastic power. However, the latter can be confronted by the ekphrastic testimony of survivors of disappearance as surrogates of those kin who lack embodied presence. Ekphrasis is the creation of an effect upon its auditors that they are actually beholding through sound and/or language what is visually and temporally withdrawn from their present. Enforced disappearance names the extrajudicial ‘abduction and deprivation of liberty’ of individuals and communities by a sovereign that conceals the act, location of the victims, circumstances of their death and their post-mortem disposition. In this article, the author navigates the complex and intertwining agonistic social rhetorics of visibility and invisibility associated with disappearance that collide as historicizing and dehistoricizing forces through competing ekphrastic rhetorics. She examines how ekphrastic witnessing as a form of blind witnessing becomes an affective media of postwar justice in a society that has erased and disavowed its war crimes.

5. Figure de l’accusé en témoin de l’accusation

In March 1945, Pejo Peev Draganov, a former official with the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (Komisarstvo po evrejskite vuprosi—KEV) in Bulgaria, appeared before Chamber 7 of the People’s Courts, an emergency court established in the fall of 1944 by the coalition of the predominantly Communist Patriotic Front for the purpose of bringing to justice the alleged perpetrators of anti-Jewish crimes in Bulgaria. As the head of the Skopje transit camp, where Macedonian Jews from Vardar, a Yugoslavian province occupied by Bulgaria during the war, were imprisoned before being deported to Poland, Draganov was accused of participating in Jewish persecutions. He left the courthouse a free man. Twenty-three years later, in 1968, Draganov once again appeared before a court of justice, specifically the Hesse District (RFA) Courthouse, in response to the lawsuit brought against the former minister plenipotentiary of the Reich in Sofia during the Second World War, Adolf-Heinz Beckerle, who had negotiated the deportation of Jews from the occupied territories with the Bulgarian authorities. This time, he testified as a witness for the prosecution. This arrangement was the result of a complex negotiation between the Prosecutor’s Office of Communist Bulgaria in Sofia and the West German prosecution.By taking as an entry point the career of this former defendant (in the sense of Howard Becker), the changes in his positioning on the chessboard of justice, and his movement within the space of East-West relations, the aim of this article is to question the production of post-war justice for war crimes in Europe from a transnational perspective, with a focus on its shifts over space and time. The research is based on an extensive examination of the archives of the trials held in 1944-1945 (in Bulgaria) and 1967-1968 (in the Federal Republic of Germany) regarding the judicial systems of these two states and their troubled collaboration during the Cold War.

Postwar Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article explores the perceptions of justice expressed by victims of severe violations of human rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) who have testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and/or the Court of BiH. In 2009, we surveyed 495 members of a victims’ association and inquired about their perceptions of postwar justice. The respondents were more likely to assess the ICTY than the Court of BiH as fair both in terms of its decisions and procedures. Compared to the perceptions of procedural justice, perceptions of distributive justice were more strongly correlated with the assessments of both courts’ overall fairness. Multivariate logistic regression models reveal that measures of procedural justice are directly related to the respondents’ evaluations of the both courts’ fairness, while demographic factors were mostly unrelated to their evaluations of the two courts. The results of our study suggest that the respondents who said that they testified at the ICTY had more positive views about both the ICTY and the Court of BiH than the respondents who said that they either testified at both courts or only at the Court of BiH.

EXPERIENCE OF BALKAN COUNTRIES ON TERRITORY INTEGRATION

The article analyzes the experience of the Balkan countries in de-occupation and reintegration of territories. Cases of conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in 1993–2019, North Macedonia since 2019) are being studied. The analysis is based on a study of all stages of conflict resolution.
 The article examines the sequence of key aspects of the settlement. Consideration of all stages of armed conflicts in the Balkan region has shown that international peace-keeping missions, with military and civilian components, play a significant role. The participation of various international organizations (UN, NATO, EU) and countries (USA) and in resolving those conflicts and further integration also had a decisive influence.
 The reintegration processes in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia were based on peace agreements, as well as the full restoration of border and territory controlling. The next stage was to ensure demilitarization and disarmament. The fully fledged process of integration also included law enforcement reform, election preparation and conduct. The issues of post-war justice, punishment for war crimes and mass human rights violations were among the top priorities. In the implementation of all these reintegration measures, international organizations were involved, which actively provided assistance and performed a monitoring function.
 Among the necessary conditions for de-occupation and peaceful reintegration are the following: consolidation and consistency of the positions of the political and military leadership, the presence of a powerful army, implementation of sanctions, economic and military-political pressure on the aggressor side, demilitarization and control of the territory, justice and amnesty with fixed frameworks.
 The prospect of further research is that valuable experience with conflict resolution settlement and reintegration contains effective mechanisms that can be adapted in the case of Ukraine.

A People’s Court: Emotion, Participant Experiences, and the Shaping of Postwar Justice at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1946‑1948

De façon similaire à Nuremberg, les principaux dirigeants politiques et militaires japonais ont été jugés à Tokyo pour des crimes qu'ils ont commis (ou fait commettre) pendant la guerre. L'International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) a condamné à mort sept accusés et prononcé de longues peines d'emprisonnement pour la majorité des autres. James Burnham Sedgwick de l'Université de Wolfsville (Canada) laisse de côté, dans cet article, l'histoire de l'institution et examine le déroulement du procès du point de vue des participants.

Macroeconomic Interventions and the Politics of Postwar Justice

This essay connects feminist political economy and critical/feminist transitional justice through the analysis of macroeconomic interventions in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Previous contributions to Critical Perspectives have argued for the need to establish a dialogue and bring down divides between feminist security studies and political economy in feminist International Relations (Elias 2015; Chisolm and Stachowitsch 2017) and to look at the spaces where security and political economy intersect as a productive line of research (Sjoberg 2015). To build these connections, feminist scholars have stressed the importance of multidimensional concepts and questioned their unidimensional use whenever relevant. Security is certainly one of the concepts benefiting from a feminist critique that has opened up its meaning, with reference to its referent objects as well as its multiple dimensions (e.g., to include women's economic security alongside physical security; see Chisolm and Stachowitsch 2017; True 2015). Another concept that has been productively reframed as multidimensional by feminist scholars is violence (Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Elias and Rai 2015; True 2012).

Criminalized Liaisons: Soviet Women and Allied Sailors in Wartime Arkhangel’sk

From 1941 to 1945 thousands of British and American sailors came to the northern Soviet ports of Arkhangel’sk and Molotovsk with Lend-Lease convoys. On the shore they made many casual contacts with local residents, in particular with Soviet women. These contacts came under close scrutiny of the Soviet authorities who tried to limit the alleged subversive influence of foreign nationals on Soviet citizens. Local women who dated Allied personnel faced harassment and repression that ranged from administrative exile to imprisonment in the Gulag. Resentments against women who had intimate relationships with foreigners during the war were widespread throughout the European theater, and not limited to the USSR. Still the Soviet authorities’ treatment of Arkhangel’sk women who dated nationals of ‘friendly’ countries was particularly harsh. They faced not just moral condemnation, but legal prosecution and long prison terms. The severity of their repression is comparable to how the Soviet side treated civilian Nazi collaborators. Ultimately, Soviet reactions to such wartime contacts with Allied nationals shed light on the broader social history of the Soviet home front, inter-Allied relationships on a grassroots level, and Soviet wartime and postwar justice that was arbitrary in nature and largely defined by local initiatives.

Detecting the Past: Detective Novels, the Nazi Past, and Holocaust Impiety

Crime writing is not often associated with Holocaust representations, yet an emergent trend, especially in German literature, combines a general, popular interest in crime and detective fiction with historical writing about the Holocaust, or critically engages with the events of the Shoah. Particularly worthy of critical investigation are Bernhard Schlink’s series of detective novels focusing on private investigator Gerhard Selb, a man with a Nazi background now investigating other people’s Nazi pasts, and Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Collini Case (2011) which engages with the often inadequate response of the post-war justice system in Germany to Nazi crimes. In these novels, the detective turns historian in order to solve historic cases. Importantly, readers also follow in the detectives’ footsteps, piecing together a slowly emerging historical jigsaw in ways that compel them to question historical knowledge, history writing, processes of institutionalised commemoration and memory formation, all of which are key issues in Holocaust Studies. The aims of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, I will argue that the significance of this kind of fiction has been insufficiently recognised by critics, perhaps in part because of its connotations as popular fiction. Secondly, I will contend that these texts can be fruitfully analysed by situating them in relation to recent debates about pious and impious Holocaust writing as discussed by Gillian Rose and Matthew Boswell. As a result, these texts act as exemplars of Rose’s contention that impious Holocaust literature succeeds by using new techniques in order to shatter the emotional detachment that has resulted from the use of clichés and familiar tropes in traditional pious accounts; and by placing detectives and readers in a position of moral ambivalence that complicates their understanding of the past on the one hand, and their own moral position on the other.

Human Rights Half Measures: Avoiding Accountability in Postwar Sri Lanka

AbstractWhy do repressive states create human rights institutions that cost them money and political capital but fail to silence international criticism? The academic literature assumes that states engaging in disingenuous human rights behavior are hoping to persuade (or deceive) liberal Western states and international advocates. But if human rights promoters in the West are the target audience for the creation of these half measures institutions, the strategy appears puzzlingly miscalculated. It reveals that the repressive state is sensitive to international opinion, and often results in increased pressure. The author argues that states engaging in human rights half measures are playing to a different, previously overlooked audience: swing states that can act as veto points on multilateral efforts to enforce human rights. The article illustrates these dynamics with a case study of Sri Lanka’s response to international pressure for postwar justice. The author shows that although the creation of a series of weak investigative commissions was prompted by pressure from Western governments andngos, it was not an attempt to satisfy or hoodwink these actors. Instead, it was part of a coalition-blocking strategy to convince fellow developing states on the UN Human Rights Council to oppose the creation of an international inquiry and to give them the political cover to do so.

Grasping neither war nor peace: the folly of cosmopolitan preventive war

ABSTRACTSome liberal-cosmopolitan theorists have sought to justify preventive war by proposing new institutions meant to ensure the accurate evaluation of non-imminent threats, and also make any war against them proportionate. In the debate over these proposals there has been little consideration of the post-war conditions any preventive war will likely produce. This is a serious omission; many theorists emphasize the degree to which the ability to secure a just peace is crucial to whether a war is proportionate. This article begins to remedy this missing piece of the debate over what it calls ‘cosmopolitan preventive war’ (CPW). After reviewing the debate, it discusses preventive war in the context of theorizations of post-war justice, or jus post bellum. It then investigates CPW’s ability to account for jus post bellum concerns through a counterfactual 2003 Iraq CPW. Showing that the proposed institutions do not do enough to account for the likely, and possibly immense, post-war harm wrought by preventive war, the article concludes with a negative evaluation of the CPW program and a brief statement on the ethics of preventive war in general.

Hidden in the Glare of the Nuremberg Trial: Impunity for the Wola Massacre As the Greatest Debacle of Post-War Trials

During the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 German soldiers within a few days murdered 30 000 – 65 000 civilians. The Wola massacre (the slaughter took place in Wola – one of boroughs of Warsaw) was described by a historian Alexandra Richie as ‘the largest single battlefield massacre of the Second World War’. Despite the fact that names of commanders responsible for conduct of hostilities in Warsaw were well known to historians and prosecutors (including Robert Jackson and Telford Taylor), none of the perpetrators belonging to German armed forces was prosecuted for crimes committed in Wola before any international or national court. Some of the main perpetrators, like Heinz Reinefarth, had even pursued a successful political career in Germany in post-war period. The present article describes the circumstances of the Wola massacre, it discusses legal qualification of the Wola massacre as a war crime, a crime against humanity or as a genocide taking into account the wording of Hitler/Himmler’s order (‘Warschau wird glattrasiert’). The article refers to legal bases of responsibility of persons involved in the massacre, including responsibility of both - commanders and their subordinates. It explains main reasons behind non-prosecution of perpetrators of the massacre in the Nuremberg trial as well as in subsequent trials which took place before national courts in Germany and in Poland. It argues that the impunity of perpetrators of the Wola massacre is an example of the greatest debacle of the post-war trials and should impact our assessment of the post-war justice achievements. It proves that even in case of mass atrocities political interests could prevail over justice which creates an obstacle to the full reconciliation between societies.

Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes by Lisa Yoneyama

Reviewed by: Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes by Lisa Yoneyama Dean Aszkielowicz (bio) Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes. By Lisa Yoneyama. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016. xii, 320 pages. $94.95, cloth; $25.95, paper. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the victorious Allies believed there was strong evidence that Japanese forces, during their invasion and occupation of territories in Asia and the Pacific, had committed serious war crimes. Led by the United States, the Allies began an ambitious program to bring to justice senior Japanese leaders who had been key in taking Japan to war and other perpetrators of war crimes. Eventually, 28 military and political figures were indicted at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo (1946–48), otherwise known as the Tokyo trial, and many thousands of Japanese soldiers, sailors, and civilians were prosecuted in military tribunals around Asia and the Pacific (1945–51). Political figures and legal thinkers on the Allied side claimed the prosecutions were to be a marker in international law which would establish that governments and individuals who wage aggressive war and commit other war crimes should be brought to justice in courts. The Allies also pursued Japan through a military occupation (1945–52) that initially included a plan to reform Japanese politics and industry, through punitive measures such as the payment of war reparations and through international agreements that defined Japan’s role in both the war and postwar regional affairs. Lisa Yoneyama argues in Cold War Ruins that the pursuit of Japanese war criminals and other Allied moves to reckon with Japan after the war became hopelessly entwined with the politics of the cold war and with the legacy of colonialism in the region, which ultimately led to the failure of Allied justice. Yoneyama examines how the Tokyo trial and the postwar political and diplomatic settlements (the San Francisco Peace Treaty [1951], the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty [1951], the Treaty of Basic Relations between Japan and Korea [1965], and other agreements) between Japan and its former enemies “performatively define the war’s meaning for the post-belligerence world” (p. 4). Yoneyama claims these agreements and the Tokyo trial have collectively produced an “Americanized view” of the war, marginalized many of the victims of Japanese crimes, and helped establish U.S. hegemony in the Pacific after the war. Moreover, the impact of the postwar settlements continues to be felt in post– cold war attempts at redress for Japanese war crimes. Scholarship on Japanese war crimes and the Allied process to bring Japan to account for those crimes has been booming in recent years. For a long time, Richard Minear’s Victor’s Justice, published in 1971, was the seminal [End Page 225] work in English dedicated to the prosecution of Japanese war criminals. It is a largely critical interpretation of the Tokyo trial.1 Since then, however, and in particular over the last ten years, scholars have addressed the question of the fairness of Allied justice from more nuanced perspectives and have produced more complex explanations of the relationship between politics and justice in the trial.2 The field is populated by as many historians as legal scholars, who seek to place the trials in their historical context and to understand what role the Allied pursuit of justice played in the early post-surrender years and what Japanese war crimes tell us about the conduct of the war.3 Cold War Ruins takes a similar approach in that it goes beyond the postwar courtrooms to examine the way the Allies—the United States in particular—attempted to control the language of justice after the war and shows how the voices of many of the victims of Japanese crimes were overwhelmed by power politics. Yoneyama views the war, its aftermath, and the cold war through an impressive multidisciplinary lens. The book is an important contribution to literature on postwar justice and on how we assess the cold war in Asia. Cold War Ruins is a series of essays loosely linked by the idea that the postwar courts and the political settlements produced an unsatisfactory level of...

The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy by Steven P. Remy

Reviewed by: The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy by Steven P. Remy David A. Messenger (bio) The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy. By Steven P. Remy. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 342. $29.95 cloth) Steven P. Remy's account of the 1946 war crimes trial of the seventy-four former members of the Waffen SS accused of killing hundreds of American prisoners of war in the vicinity of Malmedy, Belgium, in December 1944, is much more than an account of post-war justice. The Malmedy case was one of the most infamous and significant crimes against American soldiers in the Second World War. As Remy argues, however, what happened after the trial was just as significant, for when accusations of American torture and psychological stressing of German prisoners to get forced confessions emerged, it shaped the memory of the massacre for years to come, among scholars as well as others. Remy's goal is to discount these stories and re-establish the trial—and the crime—as legitimate. More importantly, in the view of this reviewer, is his effort to interpret the accusations and their longevity as part of a larger effort by Germans and Americans to recast Nazi criminals as welcome allies in the Cold War era. Remy evenly divides his book into two parts, the first of the investigation and trial itself and the second concerning the post-trial charges that the United Sates tortured the defendants in order to gain false confessions. Extensive use of war crimes records in American archives, as well as memoirs of participants, allows Remy to detail the investigations as well as the trial. In particular, his study of the prison environment at Schwäbisch Hall allows him to convincingly reject the torture accusations. Post-trial reviews of the verdicts were standard practice, and the initial review accepted the twenty-five death sentences and thirteen other convictions be approved, and thirty-four others confirmed but with reduced sentences (p. 144). The American lawyer who defended the Germans, Willis Everett, charged that the Germans had been tortured to get confessions—Everett had developed an intense disdain for the entire war crimes process, in particular for the role of American [End Page 565] and German émigré Jews in carrying out the prosecutions, which Remy concludes was part of Everett's "conspiratorial anti-Semitism that underpinned his view of a corrupt American occupation" (p. 131). Press coverage in both the United States and Germany of the torture charge grew, an effort Remy quite rightly views as part of the larger effort of Waffen SS veterans to recast themselves as soldiers in the heat of battle, and not part of a criminal organization to wage terror, as the rest of the SS was generally seen during the post-war trials (p. 167). American critics of the trials latched on to this larger German campaign, as did German clergy, who were extremely active. By 1949, a subcommittee of the Senate's Armed Services Committee held hearings in Washington, D.C. and Munich, Germany, involving freshman Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who agreed from the start that the accusations of American torture were true, and who actively pursued the argument that German Jews involved on the American side were vengeful (p. 232). All of this forced American General Lucius Clay in Germany to only carry out death sentences if unquestionable and corroborated evidence existed in any given case. By 1957, every one of the men convicted in the Malmedy case, including those with death sentences, was free. In Germany, the case was seen simply as an example of victor's justice and the abandonment of denazification, championed by the West German government of Konrad Adenauer throughout the 1950s, was justified. The active role of Waffen SS men in helping politicize war crimes trials—not just in the Malmedy case—was hugely significant, especially after 1949 (p. 261). Remy's important book shows us the extent to which these efforts shaped and altered justice in the aftermath of war. [End Page 566] David A. Messenger DAVID A. MESSENGER is professor and chair in the Department of History at the University of South Alabama...

The Tangled Politics of Postwar Justice in Sri Lanka

It was perhaps naive and overly optimistic to believe that regime change was the answer to a problem that has much deeper structural roots.

Justicia después de la guerra

Concluidas las hostilidades, ya sean o no conflictos armados formales, las partes deben rendir cuentas por su proceder. Este sentimiento es casi universalmente compartido, independientemente de la propia estructura moral o ética que tengan, aunque los detalles de esta responsabilidad son profundamente controversiales y discutidas. En la Sección 2 de este breve artículo ofrece una base normativa para la justicia después de la guerra que apela a la norma contra la impunidad. Se concluye que los procesos penales, en oposición a los mecanismos no penales, mejor reivindican la norma contra la impunidad. A la luz de esta conclusión la Sección 3 se hace la pregunta ¿cómo debemos alcanzar la justicia después de la guerra? ¿Quién debe ser llevado a juicio? (líderes o soldados de infantería), que instancias deben juzgarlos (los tribunales nacionales o internacionales), que los delitos que se deben imputar (delitos de tipo nacional o crímenes internacionales), los procedimientos que deben seguirse en los juicios, y, ¿cómo? (y por qué) deben ser castigados.

Accommodating Nazi Tyranny? The Wrong Turn of the Social Democratic Legal Philosopher Gustav Radbruch After the War

What is the relationship between Nazism and natural law—the notion of universal standards, which arise from either God, revelation, nature, rationality, or morality, and which human-made statutes cannot break? In 1946, in the wake of World War II, Gustav Radbruch, one of Germany's most respected Social Democrats and legal philosophers, published his influential article, “Statutory Injustice and Suprastatutory Law,” which grappled with a pressing issue of postwar justice. Should courts deem judges criminally responsible for having earlier convicted defendants, and often sentenced them to death, based on denunciations by family, neighbors, or rivals, denunciations that the Nazi regime had encouraged but that a fair-minded government must condemn? As a matter of jurisprudence, Radbruch set forth his famous formula, which declared that judges must adhere to positive or statutory law, except in rare circumstances in which such law violated fundamental principles of justice. In his words, “[P]ositive law, secured through legislation and power, prevails, even if it is substantively unjust and inexpedient, unless the tension between positive law and justice reaches such an intolerable level that the law as ‘false law’ must yield to justice.” As a matter of history, Radbruch excused Nazi-era judges who had missed his jurisprudential point, because they had succumbed to the legal theory of positivism that had long permeated German legal thinking. “Positivism,” Radbruch wrote, “with its belief that ‘law is law’ rendered the German judiciary defenseless against arbitrary and criminal laws.”

Too Much Property

Property’s role in postwar justice has been dominated primarily by litigation, with its emphasis on the restitution of valuable cultural or financial goods. The prominence of such litigation, however, has eclipsed a far more common experience of property, namely inheritance--the grounds of a social rather than a public or legal realm. With the recent Israeli documentary The Flat as its case study, this article proposes to shift the focus on postwar property to ownership’s other life, that of the passing on of trivial things outside the public interest. The sheer volume of these ordinary things opens the door to a different understanding of justice, one invested in the excess and unpredictability of property, yet still unable to shed fully the adversarial tenor that has largely constituted our sense of ownership after the Holocaust.

After the Dust Settles: Reflections on Postwar Justice

Traditionally, just-war ethics tries to offer an answer to two distinct moral questions: when (if ever) is it morally permissible to start a war, and how should it be fought? For this specific purpose, just-war reasoning is divided into two parts. The jus ad bellum guides our moral thinking in initiating war; the jus in bello informs us on proper moral conduct during the hostilities. More recently, however, a number of authors have felt the need to add a third element to the just-war theory, that of the jus post bellum. A war, so it is argued, has a beginning, middle and end. There is no reason then why the termination and the longer term aftermath of the war should deserve less attention from a moral point of view. A lot more needs to be said and done before the jus post bellum will reach a comparable degree of substance and sophistication to the two other just-war parts. However, this is exactly what two recently published books on the subject – Eric Patterson’s Ethics beyond War’s End and Larry May’s After War Ends: A Philosophical Perspective – aim to do.

„Jest wielu Kainów pośród nas”. Polski wymiar sprawiedliwości a Zagłada, 1944–1956

From 1944 to 1960, Poland held at least 32 000 trials for war crimes and collaboration; in particular, those records generated by the investigations of crimes against Jews have been the basis for ground-breaking studies of the Holocaust in Poland for over a decade now. While Poland was a society without a Quisling, these studies have shown that the country was still very much part of a pan-European continuum in which local people took part in ethnic cleansing inspired by the Nazi occupation. The question remains, then, of how effective the postwar judicial process against the collaborators was. This article makes use of the records of over 450 trials of accused collaborators, held between 1946 and 1949 at the district courts of Warsaw and Siedlce, of which about one-third are cases involving crimes against Jews. These trials are used as the starting point for a wider discussion of post-war justice in Poland.

Friction and the pursuit of justice in post-war Sri Lanka

This article engages with friction between international and local actors in an era of globalised transitional justice processes with cases from post-war Sri Lanka. We find that in the context of a victor's peace, the prevailing actor can mobilise ordinary people against international transitional justice initiatives, and can stage localised processes which do not involve the grass-roots level to any real extent. An actor-oriented perspective sharpens friction as an analytical concept by moving beyond the broad categories of conflicts between the local and the global. Our analysis highlights four significant actors in post-war justice: the internationalised state, domestic constituencies, the international community and diasporas, whose encounters, roles and internal complexity determine the outcomes of transitional justice processes.