Study Of Transitional Justice Research Articles

Transitional Justice Studies: Development, Challenges, and Future Directions

In an era marked by numerous conflicts and human rights violations, this article provides a comprehensive review of transitional justice studies, assessing the evolution of the field and exploring potential future directions. It addresses several critical questions: How has the field of transitional justice developed, and what factors have influenced its changes over time? What tools and techniques have been employed, and what challenges and achievements have they revealed? What significant lessons and recommendations have emerged from existing studies, and why are they important? Finally, the article also considers normative aspirations for future cases of transitional justice, particularly in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine. This analysis underscores the belief that academic self-reflection is valuable not only for students and researchers but also for national and international actors involved in implementing transitional justice strategies.

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.

Transitional Justice in Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia in a Comparative Framework

This thesis aims to enhance transitional justice studies with a focus on the Balkan peninsula, by providing a comparative analysis of the extent of transitional justice mechanisms in Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia. With the fall of military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1980s, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the emergence of new states in the 1990s, the concept of Transitional Justice (TJ) saw a significant rise in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was further propelled by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), the prolonged breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1992) as well as the fall of the communist dictatorship in Albania (1990). The emergence of new states and the state-building processes that followed the political and social changes also brought new challenges and conflicts, although they marked the end of significantly repressive political regimes. Considering that the implementation of TJ has undergone several changes over time and is dependent on the different settings in which it was employed, it is necessary to conduct extensive comparative research to determine the extent to which TJ differs in post-communist and post-conflict nations. The study has developed three main hypotheses: (1) The limited achievement of lustration law in Albania has conditioned the current status of transitional justice; (2) The state-building process has contributed to the evolution of Transitional Justice in Kosovo; (3) The power-sharing process as a TJ pillar in North Macedonia has fueled TJ in the country. By utilizing a mixed methods approach, data was collected through elite interviews, conducted in the three countries with 44 representatives from academia, politics, media, and civil society. To conclude, two hypotheses are fully upheld in terms of the limited achievement of lustration law and its implications with the current status of transitional justice in Albania; and the contribution of state-building in Kosovo to the evolution of transitional justice. The third hypothesis related to the power-sharing process in North Macedonia as a fueling mechanism for the evolution of transitional justice is partially upheld. Received: 13 February 2024 / Accepted: 30 April 2024 / Published: 5 May 2024

Installing Democracy

Transitional justice is a framework for dealing with past atrocities that are on such a large scale and so horrific that the usual institutions and justice system are unable to adequately address them. Countries in Latin America that transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s pursued transitional justice when deciding how to meet the demands of victims and what to do with perpetrators. The interdisciplinary field of transitional justice studies is robust within the social sciences and law. Yet artistic production engages in dialogues with the official and unofficial stories of the dictatorships and their legacies and also contributes to understanding transitions to democracy. This essay examines how visual art in Uruguay engages with transitional justice and memory of the dictatorship (1973–85), taking as a case study the installation Artista de mierda (Artist of Shit, 2019) by Fernando Barrios (b. 1968). Nearly four decades after Uruguay began its democratic transition, the struggle over which narratives would dominate the collective memory of state terror and what society should do about the open wounds of the dictatorship continues to be negotiated. Beyond merely reflecting common discourses about the dictatorship and democracy, Artista de mierda engages with the memory of state violence and reveals how Uruguay’s incomplete transition to democracy and its embrace of neoliberalism exacerbate inequality and create conditions for certain political figures and artists to rise to prominence within their respective fields.

On conceptions of time in human rights studies: The afterlife, Islam, and reparative justice in post-uprising Tunisia

This article argues that conceptions of time are undertheorized in human rights studies and that such conceptions have a significant impact on how people participate in systems of justice. Within the context of the transitional justice process launched in Tunisia in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring—a context deeply shaped by an Islamist/secular divide—I examine how competing notions of time led to opposing modes of participation in reparative justice. Specifically, I analyze the Islamic principle thawāb (reward in the afterlife for suffering experienced on earth) as a theological notion of time and show how it structured Islamist victims’ participation in reparations measures. Observing that critiques of reparative justice have developed through a strictly secular notion of time, this article foregrounds Islamic concepts that are still underrepresented in such studies, particularly Islamic notions of time and the afterlife. I argue that thawāb contests the universalism of the secular, linear notion of past-present-future dominant in human rights and transitional justice studies.

A Curator in the House of Memory: Restoration, Implication and the Post-Conflict Novel in Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man

ABSTRACT Aminatta Forna’s novel The Hired Man, on post-war Croatia, attests to the author's continued interest in transitional, post-conflict societies where mass atrocity and human rights violations such as forced disappearance and ethnic cleansing have taken place. Drawing on the conceptual framework of transitional justice and memory studies, this paper argues that the novel deepens and extends the concerns of post-conflict fiction in two main ways. Firstly, it explores the role of ordinary individuals as agents of restorative justice in small communities. The actual restoration of the house at the centre of the narrative transforms the building into a permanent site of memory that challenges collective amnesia and functions as a monument to coexistence on which to model future social relations. Secondly, the narrative provides an apt illustration of Rothberg’s notion of implication, foregrounding a model of indirect responsibility for historical injustice that problematises the figure of the naïve outsider through the foreign characters in the story. The narrative will work to engage these characters in collective restorative actions in the country’s troubled progress towards a fairer and more sustainable peace. The use of situational irony to enhance the theme of the indestructibility of the past will also be addressed.

The Logic of Transitional Justice and State Repression: The Effects of Human Rights Prosecutions in Post-Conflict States

Human rights prosecutions addressing wartime crimes are often credited with deterring future rights abuses, but routinely occur alongside state repression. This article develops a theory of how such prosecutions generate uneven effects across domestic human rights practice by making some repression tactics costlier than others—in the public visibility of the abuse or ease of attribution to leadership—or by directly substituting certain tactics. We test the implications with a multivariate probit analysis of novel prosecution data in contemporary conflict and post-conflict settings. Trials significantly reduce reliance on political imprisonment and extrajudicial killings, relatively visible abuses, whereas gains for less visible physical integrity rights are limited. Further, trials themselves are sometimes deployed as a direct substitute for political imprisonment. The findings reveal how human rights prosecutions themselves can be part of a government’s repressive toolkit, with implications for the study of transitional justice and the judicialization of repression.

Assembling Atrocity Archives for Syria

Abstract This article provides an ethnographically informed comparative case study of the atrocity archiving work being undertaken by two entities: the not-for-profit, civil society organization, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), and the United Nations’ International, Impartial, and Independent Mechanism for Syria (IIIM). Insights from data collected are read alongside debates within the fields of international criminal law, transitional justice, and archival studies. The article argues that this archival work is of significance in exploring how international lawyers respond to the Syrian tragedy, how they understand the possibilities and limitations of criminal trials, as well as their ethical responsibilities in possessing so much sensitive material. The example of the Syrian atrocity archive, and the innovative technological approaches it requires, provides new ways of thinking through the relationship between evidence, custodianship, and the legitimacy of (possible future) criminal trials.

The Idea of Corporate Transitional Justice: Paths to Corporate Criminology in Brazil

The essay aims to exam corporate complicity with authoritarian regimes of the past and contemporary practices for the purposes of developing the body of corporate criminology. The opening of Brazilian criminological research to the role of companies during the military regime shines new lights on corporate accountability and may, when investigating the corporate complicity with authoritarian dynamics, also open new avenues for the transitional justice studies. Especially with regard to the idea of Corporate Transitional Justice, it assumes the need for broader debates about the historical continuum and different forms of business contributions and aspects of harming and victimizing in the corporate field.

Breaking the Transitional Justice Machine: Exploring Spatiality, Space Travel, and Inbetween Spaces in Research Practice

Abstract This article offers a critical perspective on emerging and alternative spaces for emancipation within transitional justice studies. Taking into account recent critical literature and postcolonial interventions in transitional justice studies, we argue that barriers to moving our understanding of transitional justice forward are both conceptual and methodological. Conceptual hurdles are visible through narrow justice demands often limited to the context of post-conflict and post-authoritarian settings, thus normalizing injustice in liberal democratic and postcolonial contexts. Methodological impediments exist because transitional justice scholarship operates at a positivist level, or trying to explain certain, and desired, outcomes rather than destabilizing and unsettling unequal power relations. As a result, research practice in the field reflects the perspectives and preferences of elites in transition societies through a legal-technical mechanistic imagining of transitional justice that we refer to as the transitional justice machine. We argue that the needs and voices of marginalized social actors, particularly within states that are largely defined as liberal democratic or postcolonial, have long been ignored due to these practices. Against the backdrop of evolving agency patterns, including widespread global protest and demands to deal with the past across countries, we zoom in on a variety of actors who, until now, have not been at the focus of transitional justice studies. Drawing on a variety of case studies, this article contributes to the critical understanding of transitional justice studies as a Bourdieusian field. First, by expanding the conceptual lens to include racial, socio-economic, and postcolonial injustice, and, second, by advancing a more critical methodological approach that puts at its center unequal power relationships.

The Impact of Political Apologies on Public Opinion

ABSTRACTApology diplomacy promises to assuage historical grievances held by foreign publics, yet in practice appears to ignite domestic backlash, raising questions about its efficacy. This article develops a theory of how political apologies affect public approval of an apologizing government across domestic and foreign contexts. The authors test its implications using large-scale survey experiments in Japan and the United States. In the surveys, the authors present vignettes about World War II grievances and randomize the nature of a government apology. They find that apology-making, both as statements acknowledging wrongdoing and as expressions of remorse, boosts approval in the recipient state. But in the apologizing state, backlash is likely among individuals with strong hierarchical group dispositions—manifested as nationalism, social-dominance orientation, and conservatism—and among those who do not consider the recipient a strategically important partner. This microlevel evidence reveals how leaders face a crucial trade-off between improving support abroad and risking backlash at home, with implications for the study of diplomatic communication and transitional justice.

Whose justice? Youth, reconciliation, and the state in post-Ben Ali Tunisia

Human rights and transitional justice studies have increasingly homed in on the role of civil society. However, literature on marginalized actors, such as youth, still remains limited. This article examines the impact of youth activism aimed at promoting sustainable accountability efforts in the aftermath of initial reckoning with violence and repression. Drawing on more than two dozen interviews and conceptual elements of broader transition literature, this research maps the advocacy work of a youth movement, Manich Msamah, in post-Ben Ali Tunisia. Focusing on the passage of controversial legislation (the law on administrative reconciliation), the authors argue that, despite a politicization of transitional justice measures, youth activism succeeded in influencing institutionalized practices and shaping the legislative agenda-setting process. Youth activists have introduced new transitional justice tropes, particularly concepts of social and economic justice, to society. The broader participatory impact of youth in Tunisia remains nonetheless uncertain.

Different mechanisms, same result: Remembering the liberation war in Mozambique

Even though scholars have made substantial contributions in connecting the fields of transitional justice and memory studies, important questions remain unanswered. The question of sequencing is one of them. How does a certain TJ mechanism condition the implementation of subsequent mechanisms and how together they shape memory narratives in a given society? This article builds on the case of Mozambique. Soon after the signing of the General Peace Agreement in 1992, the Frelimo-led government approved Amnesty Law 15/92 and with it, the past was to be left in the past. Such a choice was different from the one taken by Samora Machel—Mozambique’s first president—between 1975 and 1982. By promoting a quasi-truth commission, Machel revisited Mozambique’s colonial past and brought comprometidos’ actions into the open. This article finds that whether the government opened up about the past or sought to leave it behind, the result has been the same: the celebratory reproduction of the liberation war narrative. Resorting to path dependence and critical junctures, this study explains the ways in which such a narrative has become hegemonic throughout the last four decades.

�New wine, old wineskins�: a comparative study of interfaith engagement and transitional justice in Kenya and South Africa

Transitional justice (TJ) is an approach that has been used by states to bring hope and renaissance in addressing past injustices. Unfortunately, transitional justice mechanisms have been ambiguous and often yield underwhelming results. While various components that constitute human societies have been incorporated in Africa�s journey towards resolving historical injustices, religion has been casually utilised, if not altogether ignored. An interfaith approach to addressing a violent past has not been exploited, yet religion played a significant role in South Africa�s (SA) post-apartheid era and Kenya�s second liberation from KANU�s single-party rule. This article will highlight the insufficiencies and gains made by past TJ mechanisms in Kenya and SA. The article will also discuss the place of interfaith engagement in confronting structural violence. Lastly, improving on SA�s TJ model, it will suggest an interfaith agenda for TJ that mitigates the horrors of historical injustices for reconciliation, peace, and stability in Kenya.

Holding the line on human rights accountability: Explaining the unlikely judicial overturn of the pardon and immunity granted to human rights violator Alberto Fujimori

Alberto Fujimori, Peruvian ex-president and perpetrator of human rights violations, was released from prison due to a presidential pardon in 2017. He was also granted immunity from prosecution. Although the political branches and the majority of the population supported these measures, as shown by public opinion polls, within months domestic courts overturned them completely, relying on standards set by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This is the most unlikely result, comparatively. The article examines what could explain this pro human rights accountability behaviour in the judiciary. It argues that the outcome could be the product of two processes initialised during the Peruvian transition: Judicial empowerment (independence and power gains) and legal culture shift from positivism to neo-constitutionalism. Both are defined and analysed with reference to transitional justice and socio-legal studies scholarship. The article further seeks to identify the conditions under which Inter-American conventionality control doctrine could have a strong domestic impact.

Transitional Justice and Transitional Journalism: Case-Study on Kosovo

Abstract This article documents the findings of an empirical project combining socio-legal and media studies, which examined journalists’ perceptions of their role in relation to transitional justice in Kosovo. Based upon the qualitative analysis of 30 semi-structured interviews with professional journalists in Kosovo during the summer of 2018, the article shows that key issues in the study of transitional justice appear in respect of what, building on notions of ‘peace journalism’, can be termed ‘transitional journalism’. Issues include the extent to which ‘transitional journalism’ is, or should be, a distinct ‘field’ at all; as well as debates about the relative priority to give to accountability, reconciliation, historical accounting, or victims’ rights within the practice of ‘transitional journalism’ at any given time. Identifying and engaging with these issues will allow greater agency in, and ownership of, decisions taken about ‘transitional journalism’.

Penal welfarism ‘gone global’? Comparing international criminal justice to The Culture of Control

With the consolidation of a cosmopolitan field of international criminal justice, penality has ‘gone global’. In spite of the abundance of doctrinal legal analysis, human rights studies, and transitional justice studies, there are few analytic attempts to engage with the working assumptions, cultural commitments, and dominant mentalities that give shape to international criminal justice as a penal field. Based on ethnographic observations, interviews with key actors, and critical reading of international criminal justice scholarship, this article compares the cosmopolitan penality of international criminal justice to that of late modern, domestic, penality. Using David Garland’s The Culture of Control as an analytic yardstick, it argues that international criminal justice both resembles and departs from ‘the national’. For example, whilst the cosmopolitan penality relies upon retributive justifications, it makes no appeal to harsh penal sanctions; nor is it concerned with the rehabilitation of prisoners. Rather, it is an expressive and humanitarian form of justice where the victim takes central stage – as the embodiment of a suffering humanity. Moreover, there is a remarkable faith in the transformative effects of international criminal justice, resembling a form of penal welfarism ‘gone global’. As national capacity building and penal development has become intrinsic to the project of international criminal justice, the article shows how the global dimension of the power to punish is based on a moralization of politics.

The Role of the Arts in Cambodia’s Transitional Justice Process

Within the study and practice of transitional justice, the roles played by the arts in addressing past human rights violations have become increasingly well accepted. This article examines the role of the arts in Cambodia’s transitional justice process, from the initial coupling of attempts to revive the arts with the pursuit of human rights in the early 1980s to the reparations orders provided by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). It identifies five main contributions the arts may make to transitional justice processes—evidence, complementary justice, outreach, activism, and critique—and demonstrates not only that various art forms have assumed each of these roles in Cambodia but also that this case extends the place of the arts in transitional justice. In particular, by highlighting the role played by local activists in seeking to revive the arts in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge period, this article reveals the significance of arts initiatives, instigated in the absence of a formal justice process, for formal processes once they eventually emerge. In doing so, it argues that without the arts initiatives and activism that preceded it, the formal inclusion of the arts in the ECCC process would not have been possible.

Destabilising Empires from the Margin: Report of the 25th North American Taiwan Studies Association Annual Conference, Seattle, 16–18 May 2019

The 25th natsa post-conference report documents the initiation, organisation, and proceedings of the event, followed by some general reflections on what we can further investigate in the future. This year, we invited scholars worldwide to come together and rethink and offer critiques on the possibilities and challenges facing Taiwan studies by unpacking the idea of ‘empire’ and ‘marginality’. Given that agenda, we opened up discussions on some key topics around researching Taiwan and East Asia, such as political economy, democratisation, transitional justice, reconciliation, lgbtq, and culture studies. Attempting to reposition Taiwan studies in the broader intellectual terrain, a series of insightful dialogues thus emerged, pointing out alternatives of Taiwan studies in the face of empire(s) and marginality. In all, the natsa has formed one of the most widely known and vivid platforms for intellectual exchanges on Taiwan studies and further conversation shall continue alongside the growth of the scholarly community.

Teoría de la justicia transicional y su vigencia en la reparación de niños, niñas y adolescentes víctimas del conflicto armado en Colombia

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar los componentes de la justicia transicional, desde la perspectiva del derecho a la reparación de los niños, niñas y adolescentes víctimas del conflicto armado en Colombia. Este análisis se efectúa a través del estudio teórico de la justicia transicional, los estándares internacionales de reparación, el marco legal colombiano y las políticas públicas de reparación con enfoque diferencial para el caso de niños, niñas y adolescentes. Concluyendo, como la indemnización, la reparación judicial y simbólica no generan una efectiva e integral reparación para las víctimas de este grupo.