Contemporary Transitional Justice: Normalising a Politics of Exception

Transitional Justice and Settler States

Transitional justice has become the dominant international framework for redressing mass harm and historical injustices. However, transitional justice is commonly premised on the notion of a recent point of rupture or change from violence and oppression to a ‘new dawn’, and has therefore been less attuned to accommodating the long-term effects of colonialism. Accordingly, the historical experie...

Deeper, broader, longer transitional justice

Transitional justice has an expectation management problem. International law imposes a right to justice and an obligation to defeat impunity from crimes against humanity. Yet there has not been a war where a substantial proportion of criminals against humanity have been convicted. Nor is one likely. The theoretical solution considered in this paper is to broaden, deepen, and lengthen our conce...

Justice, gender and the politics of multiculturalism

Arguably, the greatest recent contributions to the (somewhat exhausted) political philosophy of multiculturalism have come from feminists. The debate was famously sparked by Susan Okin’s warning that multicultural accommodation could legitimize and aggravate the oppression of women within traditional, cultural and religious groups (Okin, 1999). Critics retorted that the ‘internal minorities’ ob...

Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Theory and Practice

Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Empowerment in Transitional Justice

The last decades have seen a rise in the public use of notions from the forgiveness discourse. In the present paper it is examined what role forgiveness, reconciliation and empowerment can play in the practice of transitional justice. On the basis of empirical findings, it is shown that forgiveness is too high an ideal to aim at. The promotion of forgiveness can generate much resistance, and ev...