Criminal
tribunals, truth commissions, reparations, apologies and memorializations are
the characteristic instruments in the transitional justice toolkit that can help
societies transition from authoritarianism to democracy, from civil war to
peace, and from state-sponsored extra-legal violence to a rights-respecting
rule of law. Over the last several decades, their growing use has established
transitional justice as a body of both theory and practice whose guiding norms
and structures encompasses the range of institutional mechanisms by which
societies address the wrongs committed by past regimes in order to lay the
foundation for more legitimate political and legal order.
In Transitional
Justice, a group of leading
scholars in philosophy, law, and political science settles some of the key
theoretical debates over the meaning of transitional justice while opening up
new ones. By engaging both theorists and empirical social scientists in debates
over central categories of analysis in the study of transitional justice, it
also illuminates the challenges of making strong empirical claims about the
impact of transitional institutions.
Contributors:
Gary J. Bass, David Cohen, David Dyzenhaus, Pablo de Greiff, Leigh-Ashley
Lipscomb, Monika Nalepa, Eric A. Posner, Debra Satz, Gopal
Sreenivasan, Adrian
Vermeule, and Jeremy Webber.