Transitional And Transformative Justice

Builds on micro-level critiques of transitional justice to debate a more comprehensive alternative at the level of theory and practice.

This book engages the limits of transitional justice and, more speci

Despite the growing focus on issues of socio-economic transformation in contemporary transitional justice, the path dependencies imposed by the political economy of war-to-peace transitions and the limitations imposed by weak statehood are seldom considered. This book explores transitional justice’s prospects for seeking economic justice and reform of structures of poverty in the specific context of post-conflict states.

Beyond Transitional Justice reflects upon the state of the field (or non-field) of transitional justice in the current conjuncture, as well as identifying new possibilities and challenges in the fields with which transitional justice overlaps (such as human rights, peacebuilding, and development). Chapters intervene at the cutting edge of contemporary transitional justice research, addressing key theoretical and empirical questions and covering critical, international, interdisciplinary, theoretical, and practice-oriented content. In particular, the notion of transformative justice is discussed in light of the emerging scholarship defining and applying this concept as either an approach within or an alternative to transitional justice. The book considers the extent to which transformative justice as a concept adds value to scholarship on transitional justice and related areas and asks what the future might hold for this area as a field – or non-field. A timely intervention, Beyond Transitional Justice is ideal reading for scholars and students in the fields of human rights, peace and conflict studies, international law, critical legal theory, development studies, criminology, and victimology.

Transitional justice mechanisms employed in post-conflict and post-authoritarian contexts have largely focused upon individual violations of a narrow set of civil and political rights, as well as the provision of legal and quasi-legal remedies, such as truth commissions, amnesties and prosecutions. In contrast, this book highlights the significance of structural violence in producing and reproducing rights violations. The book further argues that, in order to remedy structural violations of human rights, there is a need to utilise a different toolkit from that typically employed in transitional justice contexts. The book sets out and applies a definition of transformative justice as expanding upon, and providing an alternative to, transitional justice. Focusing on a comparative study of social movements, nongovernmental organisations and trade unions working on land and housing rights in South Africa, and their network relationships, the book argues that networks of this kind make an important contribution to processes advancing transformative justice.

This book explores how restorative justice is used and what its potential benefits are in situations where the state has been either explicitly or implicitly involved in human rights abuses. Restorative justice is increasingly becoming a popular mechanism to respond to crime in democratic settings and while there is a burgeoning literature on these contexts, there is less information that focuses explicitly on its use in nations that have experienced protracted periods of conflict and oppression. This book interrogates both macro and micro utilisations of restorative justice, including truth commissions, criminal justice reform and the development of initiatives by communities and other non-state actors. The central premise is that the primary potential of restorative justice in responding to international crime should be viewed in terms of the lessons that it provides for problem-solving, rather than its traditional role as a mechanism or process to respond to conflict. Four values are put forward that should frame any restorative approach – engagement, empowerment, reintegration and transformation. It is thought that these values provide enough space for local actors to devise their own culturally relevant processes to achieve longstanding peace. This book will be of interest to those conducting research in the fields of restorative justice, transitional justice as well as criminology in general.

Restorative justice is increasingly being applied to settings characterized by large-scale violence and human rights abuses. While many embrace this development as an important step in attempts to transform protracted conflict, there are a number of conceptual challenges in transporting restorative justice from a democratic setting to one which has been affected by mass victimisation or civil war. These include responding to the seriousness and scale of harms that have been caused, the blurred boundaries between victims and offenders, and the difficulties associated with holding someone to account and compelling reparative activities. Despite reams of paper being devoted to defining restorative justice within democratic settings (where the concept first emerged), restorative scholars have been slow to comment on the integration of restorative justice into the transitional justice discourse. Restorative Justice in Transitional Settings brings together a number of leading scholars from around the world to respond to this gap by developing and further articulating restorative justice for transitional settings. These scholars push the boundaries of restorative justice to seek more effective approaches to addressing the causes and consequences of conflict and oppression in these diverse contexts. Each chapter highlights a limitation with current conceptions of restorative justice in the transitional justice literature and then suggests a way in which the limitation might be overcome. This book has strong interdisciplinary value and will be of interest to criminologists, legal scholars, and those engaged with international relations and peace treaties.

This volume bridges two different research fields and the current debates within them. On the one hand, the transitional justice literature has been shaken by powerful calls to make the doctrine and practice of justice more transformative. On the other hand, collective memory studies now tend to look more closely at meaningful silences to make sense of what nations leave out when they remember their pasts. The book extends the scope of this heuristic approach to the different mechanisms that come under the umbrella of transitional justice, including legal prosecution, truth-seeking and reparations, alongside memorialisation. The 15 chapters included in the volume, written by expert scholars from diverse disciplinary and societal backgrounds, explore a range of practices intended to deal with the past, and how making the invisible visible again can make transitional justice - or indeed, any societal engagement with the past - more transformative. Seeking to combine contextual depth and comparative width, the book features two key case analyses - South Africa and Sri Lanka - alongside discussions of multiple cases, including such emblematic sites as Rwanda and Argentina, but also sites better known for resisting than for embracing international norms of transitional justice, such as Turkey or Côte d’Ivoire. The different contributions, grouped in themed sections, progressively explore the issues, actors and resources that are typically forgotten when societies celebrate their pasts rather than mourning their losses and, in doing so, open new possibilities to build more inclusive processes for addressing the present consequences of past injustice.