I have just done a quick revision of the portion of the book chapter that I “junked” last week that deals with the development of the “transitional justice” field since 1945. And, as promised last week, I’ve now uploaded that text into the JWN archives.
This text is a part of my earlier plan for Chapter 11 of the “Violence and its Legacies” book. I appended to it, in the same file there, the latest version I have of the chart I’ve been compiling on truth commissions (which form only a part of the broader TJ field.)
I titled the text Notes on the development of ‘transitional justice’ since 1945.
In it, I make some important, preliminary arguments that the changes the field has already been undergoing, at the level of practice, in the past 10-15 years need to be made more explicit in the theory; and that the theory therefore, explicitly, needs to be made much broader and more holistic.
Some people have already started to reflect seriously on the need to broaden the definition and purview of the field, and the implications of making that shift. Luckily, some of them– Rama Mani, Bill Schabas, Gerald Gahima, etc– were at the UNU conference I went to last month. But I do think that more work needs to be done to make this shift more explicit.
I would really love to use this thread for comments and feedback.
5 thoughts on “Notes on the development of transitional justice”
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Wow, lots of good stuff here. I’ll have to give it due consideration before I respond. As a first thought, though, have you considered whether the transitional justice field should be extended back to Versailles, where there was some (albeit inconclusive) discussion of how to deal with German war crimes?
BTW, I’m still in the process of writing something about truth commissions.
Jonathan, we meet again in one of our almost bilateral conversations on transitional justice, huh?
You can probably see some echoes of our earlier discussions in the text I wrote and then uploaded there.
Since then, I’ve reached a judgment that I shd probably add one more “truth commission” to my table: the one established by the Republika Srpska in 2003,on the Srebenica massacre. It issued a first report to the RS president and to the High Rep, Paddy Ashdown, last spring. He didn’t like that version at all and demanded a new one which he got in June and liked a lot more.
The ICTJ report from which I got this info states (top of p.10): The Commission
It looks as though it hasn’t been published yet. On the OHR website they have a lot of mentions of a first version of the report being “issued” in June. But by that, I don’t think they mean “published”.
It probably wouldn’t be fair if I re-titled the Table “Truth commissions from Idi Amin to the Republika Srpska”, would it?
Re Versailles, meanwhile, the whole post-WW1 settelement was almost a textbook case of how now NOT to do TJ.
Absolutely. When I write about a historical topic, though, I prefer to go from roots to fruits, and Versailles is one of the roots of TJ. I believe there was some discussion of international prosecutions of German war criminals; the discussion came to nothing and Germany was allowed to get away with a few show trials, but certainly the idea of transitional justice was starting to be floated around that time.
It probably wouldn’t be fair if I re-titled the Table “Truth commissions from Idi Amin to the Republika Srpska”, would it?
Maybe not, but you just gave me a title for my essay. 🙂