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21 books match the query 'Transitional justice'

cover of Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence

Archiving Sovereignty

Law, History, Violence

Stewart Motha

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Archiving Sovereignty shows how courts use fiction in their treatment of sovereign violence. Law's complicity with imperial and neocolonial practices occurs when courts inscribe and repeat the fabulous tales that provide an alibi for archaic sovereign acts that persist in the present. The United Kingdom's depopulation of islands in the Indian Ocean to serve the United States' neoimperial interests, Australia's exile and abandonment of refugees on remote islands, the failure to acknowledge genocidal acts or colonial dispossession, and the memorial work of the South African Constitution after apartheid are all sustained by historical fictions. This history-work of law constitutes an archive where sovereign violence is mediated, dissimulated, and sustained. Stewart Motha extends the concept of the "archive," as site of origin and source of authority, to signifying what law does in preserving and disavowing the past at the same time.

Sovereignty is often cast as a limit-concept, constituent force, determining the boundary of law. Archiving Sovereignty reverses this to explain how judicial pronouncements inscribe and sustain extravagant claims to exceptionality and sovereign solitude. This wide-ranging, critical work distinguishes between myths that sustain neocolonial orders and fictions that generate new forms of political and ethical life.
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cover of Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

Becoming Rwandan

Education, Reconciliation, and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen

S. Garnett Russell

Rutgers University Press, 2020

In the aftermath of the genocide, the Rwandan government has attempted to use the education system in order to sustain peace and shape a new generation of Rwandans. Their hope is to create a generation focused on a unified and patriotic future rather than the ethnically divisive past. Yet, the government’s efforts to manipulate global models around citizenship, human rights, and reconciliation to serve its national goals have had mixed results, with new tensions emerging across social groups. Becoming Rwandan argues that although the Rwandan government utilizes global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the intention of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and undermining a sustainable peace.
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cover of Book of the Disappeared: The Quest for Transnational Justice

Book of the Disappeared

The Quest for Transnational Justice

Jennifer Heath and Ashraf Zahedi, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Book of the Disappeared confronts worldwide human rights violations of enforced disappearance and genocide and explores the global quest for justice with forceful, outstanding contributions by respected scholars, expert practitioners, and provocative contemporary artists. This profoundly humane book spotlights our historic inhumanity while offering insights for survival and transformation.

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cover of Cambodia's Trials: Contrasting Visions of Truth, Transitional Justice and National Recovery

Cambodia's Trials

Contrasting Visions of Truth, Transitional Justice and National Recovery

Edited by Robin Biddulph and Alexandra Kent

National University of Singapore Press, 2023

New insights into understanding how Cambodia grapples with its traumatic historical past. 

More than four decades have passed since the end of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia in 1979. Even so, the country is still coming to terms with the destruction wrought by the Khmer Rouge during both the time they were in power and during the period of guerrilla resistance that lasted until 1998. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, or the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC), was established in 2006 to bring the Khmer Rouge leadership to justice. In many ways a product of the 1990s, when liberal democracy appeared to be on the rise both in Cambodia and internationally, the ECCC was imagined as a transitional justice initiative that would help ease the transition to liberal democracy. 

The ECCC has long been the focus of scholarly attention in Cambodia’s recovery, but this compelling study argues that such an approach is dated, noting that the political circumstances in which the ECCC was born have since changed profoundly, both globally and locally. Cambodia’s current situation can no longer be analyzed solely in terms of transitional justice narratives or the work of the ECCC, and other ways in which Cambodians have come to terms with their past and built new lives must be considered. By decentering the ECCC in the scholarly narrative of Cambodia’s recovery, the volume’s authors offer fascinating new insights into the Khmer Rouge period and more recent years of social, cultural, and political change in Cambodia.
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cover of Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence: Imagination, Empathy, and Resilience

Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence

Imagination, Empathy, and Resilience

Edited by Eve Monique Zucker and Laura McGrew

University of Michigan Press, 2020

Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence demonstrates how imagination, empathy, and resilience contribute to the processes of social repair after ethnic and political violence. Adding to the literature on transitional justice, peacebuilding, and the anthropology of violence and social repair, the authors show how these conceptual pathways--imagination, empathy and resilience--enhance recovery, coexistence and sustainable peace.  Coexistence (or reconciliation) is the underlying goal or condition desired after mass violence, enabling survivors to move forward with their lives. Imagination allows these survivors--victims, perpetrators, bystanders--to draw guidance and inspiration from their social and cultural imaginaries, to develop empathy, and to envision a future of peace and coexistence. Resilience emerges through periods of violence and its aftermaths through acts of survival, compassion, modes of rebuilding social worlds, and the establishment of a peaceful society.

Focusing on society at the grass roots level, the authors discuss the myriad and little understood processes of social repair that allow ruptured societies and communities to move toward a peaceful and stable future. The volume also illustrates some of the ways in which imagination, empathy, and resilience may contribute to the prevention of future violence and the authors conclude with a number of practical and policy recommendations. The cases include Cambodia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Columbia, the Southern Cone, Iraq, and Bosnia.

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cover of Disputed Pasts: Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil

Disputed Pasts

Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil

Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako

University of Texas Press, 2026

How the memory of military dictatorship shapes Brazil's political divides and the far-right's rise.

Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985, but its history still looms large over the country. Since the restoration of democracy, national politics have been shaped by heated contestation over the dictatorship’s legacy. Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako examine how the state, the military, and civil society have variously mourned, celebrated, and suppressed memories of Brazil’s violent past—and to what ends.

As the dictatorship faltered under pressure from the opposition in the streets and in Congress, popular opinion favored democracy, which often meant forgetting. Today, the Brazilian left contends that the past has been silenced, paving the way for Jair Bolsonaro and the far right. Yet the past has been intensely contested: media outlets, social movements, and official commissions have long documented the dictatorship and spurred reparations. Disputed Pasts argues that the conservative ascendency is a reaction to these efforts of remembrance. The right seeks to rehabilitate the violent past by discrediting victims and elevating the dictatorship’s anti-communist ideology. Far from forgetting the past, Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo actively remember and celebrate it.

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cover of Duty to Respond: Mass Crime, Denial, and Collective Responsibility

Duty to Respond

Mass Crime, Denial, and Collective Responsibility

Nenad Dimitrijevic

Central European University Press, 2011

The subject of the book is responsibility for collective crime. Collective crime is an act committed by a significant number of the members of a group, in the name of all members of that group, with the support of the majority of group members, and against individuals targeted on the basis of their belonging to a different group.The central claim is that all members of the group in whose name collective crime is committed share responsibility for it. This book's special interest is with analytical and normative defense of arguments that purport to explain reasons for, and the character of, responsibility of decent people. Those who did not intend, support, or committed wrong, are still accountable in a non-vicarious manner. The basis of their responsibility is the crime-specific relationship between group identity and personal identity.
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cover of Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru: Decolonizing Transitional Justice

Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru

Decolonizing Transitional Justice

Pascha Bueno-Hansen

University of Illinois Press, 2015

In 2001, following a generation of armed conflict and authoritarian rule, the Peruvian state created a Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). Pascha Bueno-Hansen places the TRC, feminist and human rights movements, and related non-governmental organizations within an international and historical context to expose the difficulties in addressing gender-based violence. Her innovative theoretical and methodological framework based on decolonial feminism and a critical engagement with intersectionality facilitates an in-depth examination of the Peruvian transitional justice process based on field studies and archival research. Bueno-Hansen uncovers the colonial mappings and linear temporality underlying transitional justice efforts and illustrates why transitional justice mechanisms must reckon with the societal roots of atrocities, if they are to result in true and lasting social transformation. Original and bold, Feminist and Human Rights Struggles in Peru elucidates the tension between the promise of transitional justice and persistent inequality and impunity.
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cover of Historical Justice and Memory

Historical Justice and Memory

Edited by Klaus Neumann and Janna Thompson

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

Historical Justice and Memory highlights the global movement for historical justice—acknowledging and redressing historic wrongs—as one of the most significant moral and social developments of our times. Such historic wrongs include acts of genocide, slavery, systems of apartheid, the systematic persecution of presumed enemies of the state, colonialism, and the oppression of or discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities.
            The historical justice movement has inspired the spread of truth and reconciliation processes around the world and has pushed governments to make reparations and apologies for past wrongs. It has changed the public understanding of justice and the role of memory. In this book, leading scholars in philosophy, history, political science, and semiotics offer new essays that discuss and assess these momentous global developments. They evaluate the strength and weaknesses of the movement, its accomplishments and failings, its philosophical assumptions and social preconditions, and its prospects for the future.
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cover of How the Military Remembers: Human Rights and Countermemories in Latin America

How the Military Remembers

Human Rights and Countermemories in Latin America

Edited by Cynthia E. Milton and Michael J. Lazzara

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

This groundbreaking collection of essays examines how Latin American militaries construct memories of past human rights violations in ways that challenge established public memory and human rights discourse. While previous studies have focused on democratization, transitional justice, and victim-centered narratives, this volume takes a different approach. It highlights the importance of deconstructing the military’s own active memory work, or their “countermemories”—a term the editors use to describe military narratives that are both counterintuitive and that run counter to the victim-oriented memories that have long dominated the region’s public memory.

With attention to the distinct cultural, political, and historical contexts across Latin America, the essays reveal how military figures and institutions appropriate mechanisms of truth-telling and accountability to reframe the past, blur the lines between perpetrator and victim, and weaponize memory itself.

Contributors: Mariana Achugar, Gabriela Fried Amilivia, Rebecca Atencio, Jo-Marie Burt, Rachel Hatcher, Nicolás Rodríguez Idárraga, Michael J. Lazzara, Cynthia E. Milton, Carla Granados Moya, María Emma Wills Obregón, Leith Passmore, Valentina Salvi, Gladys Vásquez Zevallos
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cover of Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú

Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú

Sylvanna M. Falcón

University of Illinois Press, 2024

In 2003, Perú’s Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR) issued its groundbreaking final report on the human rights abuses perpetuated by two revolutionary groups and the country’s armed forces and police from 1980 to 2000. Sylvanna M. Falcón examines how local communities in Lima have formed oppositional spaces, movements, and communities to challenge a status quo that erases Perú’s history of internal violence. These counterpublics focus on human rights-oriented memory that acknowledges the legacies of racism and misogyny underlying the violence. Falcón’s decolonial feminist analysis challenges the rise of authoritarianism in democratic societies while exploring the limits of liberalism to counteract it. As she shows, projects shaped by counterpublic memory best equip Perúvians to enact real, liberatory, and transformative justice for human rights violations both past and present.

Engaging and intimate, Human Rights Counterpublics in Perú illuminates the power of human rights and memory work.

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cover of Inside Rwanda's /Gacaca/ Courts: Seeking Justice after Genocide

Inside Rwanda's /Gacaca/ Courts

Seeking Justice after Genocide

Bert Ingelaere

University of Wisconsin Press, 2018

After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, victims, perpetrators, and the country as a whole struggled to deal with the legacy of the mass violence. The government responded by creating a new version of a traditional grassroots justice system called gacaca. Bert Ingelaere, based on his observation of two thousand gacaca trials, offers a comprehensive assessment of what these courts set out to do, how they worked, what they achieved, what they did not achieve, and how they affected Rwandan society.

Weaving together vivid firsthand recollections, interviews, and trial testimony with systematic analysis, Ingelaere documents how the gacaca shifted over time from confession to accusation, from restoration to retribution. He precisely articulates the importance of popular conceptions of what is true and just. Marked by methodological sophistication, extraordinary evidence, and deep knowledge of Rwanda, this is an authoritative, nuanced, and bittersweet account of one of the most important experiments in transitional justice after mass violence.

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cover of Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina

Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina

Noe Montez

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

Author Noe Montez considers how theatre, as a site of activism, produces memory narratives that change public reception to a government’s transitional justice policies. Drawing on contemporary research in memory studies and transitional justice, Montez examines the Argentine theatre’s responses to the country’s transitional justice policies—truth and reconciliation hearings, trials, amnesties and pardons, and memorial events and spaces—that have taken place in the last decade of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
 
Montez explores how the sociohistorical phenomenon of the Teatroxlaidentidad—an annual showcase staged with the support of Argentina’s Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo—acted as a vehicle for drawing attention to the hundreds of children kidnapped from their families during the dictatorship and looks at why the memory narratives regarding the Malvinas Islands (also known as the Falklands) range from ideological appropriations of the islands, to absurdist commentaries about the failed war that signaled the dictatorship’s end, to the islands’ heavily contested status today.
 
Memory, Transitional Justice, and Theatre in Postdictatorship Argentina explores the vibrant role of theatrical engagement in postdictatorship Argentina, analyzes plays by artists long neglected in English-language articles and books, and explores the practicalities of staging performances in Latin America.
 
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cover of Phenomenal Justice: Violence and Morality in Argentina

Phenomenal Justice

Violence and Morality in Argentina

Eva van Roekel

Rutgers University Press, 2020

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title​
Short-listed for the Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America from Duke University Libraries

How do victims and perpetrators of political violence caught up in a complicated legal battle experience justice on their own terms? Phenomenal Justice is a compelling ethnography about the reopened trials for crimes against humanity committed during the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Grounded in phenomenological anthropology and the anthropology of emotion, this book establishes a new theoretical basis that is faithful to the uncertainties of justice and truth in the aftermath of human rights violations. The ethnographic observations and the first-person stories about torture, survival, disappearance, and death reveal the enduring trauma, heartfelt guilt, happiness, battered pride, and scratchy shame that demonstrate the unreserved complexities of truth and justice in post-conflict societies. Phenomenal Justice will be an indispensable contribution to a better understanding of the military dictatorship in Argentina and its aftermath.
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cover of Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty

Rwanda's Genocide Heritage

Between Justice and Sovereignty

Delia Duong Ba Wendel

Duke University Press, 2025

In Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims’ remains for public display. Rwanda’s genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms trauma heritage, wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized—made visible in public space—to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda’s genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.
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cover of The Khmer Rouge Tribunal: Power, Politics, and Resistance in Transitional Justice

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal

Power, Politics, and Resistance in Transitional Justice

Julie Bernath

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

From 1975 to 1979, while Cambodia was ruled by the brutal Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) regime, torture, starvation, rape, and forced labor contributed to the death of at least a fifth of the country’s population. Despite the severity of these abuses, civil war and international interference prevented investigation until 2004, when protracted negotiations between the Cambodian government and the United Nations resulted in the establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or Khmer Rouge tribunal. The resulting trials have been well scrutinized, with many scholars seeking to weigh the results of the tribunal against the extent of the offenses. 

Here, Julie Bernath takes a different tack, deliberately decentering the trials in an effort to understand the ECCC in its particular context—and, by extension, the degree to which notions of transitional justice generally must be understood in particular social, cultural, and political contexts. She focuses on “sites of resistance” to the ECCC, including not only members of the elite political class but also citizens who do not, for a variety of tangled reasons, participate in the tribunal—and even resistance from victims of the regime and participants in the trials. Bernath demonstrates that the ECCC both shapes and is shaped by long-term contestation over Cambodia’s social, economic, and political transformations, and thereby argues that transitional justice must be understood locally rather than as a homogenous good that can be implanted by international actors.
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cover of The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste

The Unruly Dead

Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste

Lia Kent

University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them. 

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—at least a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.
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cover of Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence

Transitional Justice

Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence

Hinton, Alexander Laban

Rutgers University Press, 2011

How do societies come to terms with the aftermath of genocide and mass violence, and how might the international community contribute to this process? Recently, transitional justice mechanisms such as tribunals and truth commissions have emerged as a favored means of redress. Transitional Justice, the first edited collection in anthropology focused directly on this issue, argues that, however well-intentioned, transitional justice needs to more deeply grapple with the complexities of global and transnational involvements and the local on-the-ground realities with which they intersect.Contributors consider what justice means and how it is negotiated in different localities where transitional justice efforts are underway after genocide and mass atrocity. They address a variety of mechanisms, among them, a memorial site in Bali, truth commissions in Argentina and Chile, First Nations treaty negotiations in Canada, violent youth groups in northern Nigeria, the murder of young women in post-conflict Guatemala, and the gacaca courts in Rwanda.
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cover of Transitions: Legal Change, Legal Meanings

Transitions

Legal Change, Legal Meanings

Austin Sarat

University of Alabama Press, 2012

Transitions: Legal Change, Legal Meanings illustrates the various intersections, crises, and shifts that continually occur within the law, and how these moments of change interact with and comment on contemporary society.

Together the essays in this volume investigate the transformation of US law during moments of political change and explore what we can learn about law by examining its role and its use in times of transition. Whether by an abrupt shift in regime or an orderly progression from one government to the next, political change often calls into question the stability and versatility of the law, making it appear temporarily absent or in suspension.  What challenges to the law arise at these times? To what extent do transitional periods foster ingenuity and resourcefulness, and how might they precipitate crises in legal authority? What do moments of legal change mean for law itself and how legal institutions bring about and respond to times of transition in legal arrangements? Transitions begins the scholarly exploration of these questions that have largely been neglected.
 
Contributors
Akhil Reed Amar / William L. Andreen /
Jack M. Beermann / Heather Elliott / Joshua
Alexander Geltzer / David Gray / Paul
Horwitz / Daniel H. Joyner / Nina
Mendelson / Meredith Render / Austin
Sarat / Ruti Teitel / Lindsey Ohlsson Worth
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cover of Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice

Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

Adler, Nanci

Rutgers University Press, 2018

Since the 1980s, an array of legal and non-legal practices—labeled Transitional Justice—has been developed to support post-repressive, post-authoritarian, and post-conflict societies in dealing with their traumatic past. In Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice, the contributors analyze the processes, products, and efficacy of a number of transitional justice mechanisms and look at how genocide, mass political violence, and historical injustices are being institutionally addressed. They invite readers to speculate on what (else) the transcripts produced by these institutions tell us about the past and the present, calling attention to the influence of implicit history conveyed in the narratives that have gained an audience through international criminal tribunals, trials, and truth commissions. Nanci Adler has gathered leading specialists to scrutinize the responses to and effects of violent pasts that provide new perspectives for understanding and applying transitional justice mechanisms in an effort to stop the recycling of old repressions into new ones.  
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cover of Unrepayable Debt: Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire

Unrepayable Debt

Law, Redress, Reconciliation, and the Unmaking of Empire

Yukiko Koga

University of Chicago Press, 2026

What does it mean, and take, to repay the unrepayable?

Unrepayable Debt explores belated attempts to reckon with the savage plundering of labor and life under the Japanese empire. Located within global conversations on reparations for colonialism and slavery, and centered on slave labor lawsuits brought by Chinese victims seeking overdue justice in Japanese courts, Yukiko Koga traces a sea change in the legal sphere propelled by an unprecedented transnational redress movement. The lawsuits exposed not only the original violence but also a structure of transitional injustice etched onto the unmaking of the Japanese empire, which left victims silenced and unredressable for decades.

Challenging the idea of reckoning as a discrete event that brings closure through settlements, apology, or compensation, Koga’s ethnography details the slow and messy intergenerational work of reconciliation on the ground. The book shows how the re-pairing of severed relations, separated by lineages of victimhood and perpetration, lies at the core of repair. By bringing to the surface the prolonged and entangled processes of decolonization and deimperialization, Unrepayable Debt compels a rethinking of what redress, repair, and reconciliation mean, how they are practiced, and where accountability lies.

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