Reframing Transitional Justice: Innovations, Boundaries, and Refractions

This book challenges the simplicity, predestination, and self-evident nature of contemporary narratives of transitional justice.

Transitional justice is the field of study that examines how states should reckon with massive human rights abuses. The book upends these assumptive narratives on three crucial fronts. The first front is that of innovations. Here, the book questions the ability of transitional justice to deliver tangible successes in an era of rapid and overwhelming technological change and contestation over what constitutes human memory, communicative dialogue, and reliable evidence. The second front involves boundaries. Here the book confronts the professed superpower of transitional justice to do more and more, in an endless concatenation of additives. While there is cause for optimism, this book also suggests that transitional justice remains awkward in how it copes with the existential pressures of environmental, health, and cultural crises. On its third front, refractions, this book identifies how transitional justice addresses racism, misogyny, and democratic backsliding. How the prism of transitional justice interventions refracts these scourges remains inadequate. Throughout, the book asks readers to imagine where the field and practice of transitional justice could go from here―what new innovations are required, what boundaries must be stretched or retrenched, and what perspectives need to be considered due to new ways of seeing current and past atrocities.

Accordingly, this book will be of considerable interest to academics, practitioners working on post-conflict reconstruction, and students at all levels ranging from undergraduate to post-doctoral in the areas of law, politics, cultural property, criminology, human rights, international relations, and technology studies.

Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor and Director, Transnational Law Institute, at Washington and Lee University. He has held visiting appointments and has taught at law schools worldwide, including Queen’s University Belfast, Oxford University (University College), Université de Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), Free University of Amsterdam, University of Melbourne, Masaryk University (Czechia), and John Cabot University in Rome. His work has been relied upon by national and international courts, and he has served as defense lawyer in Rwandan genocide trials; co-authored an amicus brief to the International Criminal Court in the Ongwen case; and been an expert in litigation including on international terrorism, with the UN in matters involving child soldiers, and with the UN Human Rights Council in the drafting of a global convention to criminalise racist hate speech. He is editor-in-chief of the International Criminal Law Review.

Kirsten J. Fisher is Associate Professor of Political Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. She has held visiting and research positions at McGill University, the University of Helsinki, the University of Ottawa, and KU Leuven. She works on issues of post-atrocity justice, theories of international criminal law, and post-conflict social reconstruction. Much of her work is grounded in field research in northern Uganda.