Transitional Justice in Aparadigmatic Contexts: Accountability, Recognition, and Disruption

This book explores the practical and theoretical opportunities as well as the challenges raised by the expansion of transitional justice into new and ‘aparadigmatic’ cases.

The book defines transitional justice as the pursuit of accountability, recognition and/or disruption and applies an actor-centric analysis focusing on justice actors’ intentions of and responses to transitional justice. It offers a typology of different transitional justice contexts ranging from societies experiencing ongoing conflict to consolidated democracies, and includes chapters from all types of aparadigmatic contexts. This covers transitional justice in states with contested political authority, shared political authority, and consolidated political authority. The transitional justice initiatives explored by the wide range of contributors are those of Afghanistan, Belgium, France, Greenland/Denmark, Libya, Syria, Turkey/Kurdistan, UK/Iraq, US, and Yemen. Through these aparadigmatic case studies, the book develops a new framework that, appropriate to its expanding reach, allows us to understand the practice of transitional justice in a more context-sensitive, bottom-up, and actor-oriented way, which leaves room for the complexity and messiness of interventions on the ground.

The book will appeal to scholars and practitioners in the broad field of transitional justice, as represented in law, criminology, politics, conflict studies and human rights.

The Introduction, Chapter 8 and the Concluding Remarks of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Tine Destrooper is Associate Professor at the Human Rights Centre, Ghent University, Belgium.

Line Engbo Gissel is Associate Professor at Roskilde University, Denmark.

Kerstin Bree Carlson is Associate Professor at Roskilde University and The American University of Paris.