Reparations, Restitution, Transitional Justice

Restorative Justice and Reparations

In her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Martha Minow begins a chapter on reparations with a brief discussion of restorative justice. She characterizes restorative justice as seeking “repair of social connections and peace rather than retribution against offenders;” she describes it as “building connections and enhancing communication between perpetrators and those they victimized, and fo...

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied: Logics for a Temporal Account of Reparations and Legal Compliance

In this paper we extend the logic of violation proposed by [14] with time, more precisely, we temporalise that logic. The resulting system allows us to capture many subtleties of the concept of legal compliance. In particular, the formal characterisation of compliance can handle different types of legal obligation and different temporal constraints over them. The logic is also able to represent...

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...

Transitional Justice and Reconciliation: Theory and Practice