Mad Science? Possibilities for and Examples of Synthetic (Neo)Traditional Practices of Justice and Acknowledgement

Transitional justice has typically relied on a handful of mechanisms, including trials, truth commissions, and reparations programmes, in seeking justice after conflict. In many societies, however, these mechanisms have less salience and value than do traditional practices of justice. Often, this occurs in large part because these transitional justice mechanisms have been imported and the community has simply failed to engage with them. Customary law, on the contrary, is community-based and well-known to the people who use it. And so, while the conventional transitional justice literature has relied on and recommended the use of mechanisms and approaches including trials, tribunals, and reparations schemes, this paper explores the use of an alternative mechanism: customary practices of justice and acknowledgement. The idea is that practices of customary law might reasonably be used in transitional societies, in place of other, “foreign” practices like truth commissions and trials in bringing about the same objectives sought by the mechanisms more often used.