Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities After Mass Violence

Through war crimes prosecutions, truth commissions, purges of perpetrators, reparations, and memorials, transitional justice practices work under the assumptions that truth telling leads to reconciliation, prosecutions bring closure, and justice prevents the recurrence of violence. But when local responses to transitional justice destabilize these assumptions, the result can be a troubling disconnection between international norms and survivors' priorities.

Localizing Transitional Justice traces how ordinary people respond to—and sometimes transform—transitional justice mechanisms, laying a foundation for more locally responsive approaches to social reconstruction after mass violence and egregious human rights violations. Recasting understandings of culture and locality prevalent in international justice, this vital book explores the complex, unpredictable, and unequal encounter among international legal norms, transitional justice mechanisms, national agendas, and local priorities and practices.

Rosalind Shaw is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. Lars Waldorf is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York (UK), and previously ran Human Rights Watch's field office in Rwanda. Pierre Hazan is Visiting Professor of Post-Conflict Justice at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.