Scholars and policymakers have turned increasing attention to questions of transitional justice, those legal responses to a former regime's repressive acts following a change in political systems. Although there is a rich, interdisciplinary literature that addresses the value of various transitional justice measures, theoretical arguments for how and under what conditions we should expect to see these measures implemented tend to gravitate to intuitively appealing relative power considerations. But attempts at parsimony have tended to leave the dependent variable either overly restrictive or poorly defined, yielding theories that are difficult to test. In this article, the author proposes a 'transitional justice spectrum' based on a hierarchical series of possible accountability mechanisms and designed to allow researchers to conduct more rigorous, cross-national tests of justice arguments. The objective here is not to posit a broad theory of transitional justice, but to open the debate into a methodological weakness in the transitional justice literature. The article includes seven accountability mechanisms: cessation and codification of human rights violations; condemnation of the old system; rehabilitation and compensation for victims; creation of a truth commission; purging human rights abusers from public function; criminal prosecution of 'executors' (those lower on the chain-of-command); criminal prosecution of commanders (those higher on the chain-of-command).

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While the study of transitional justice, and especially truth commissions, has gained in popularity over the past two decades, the literature is overwhelmingly focused on activities in democratizing states. This introduces a selection bias that interferes with proper analysis of causes and consequences of transitional justice on a global scale. In this paper, I discuss conditions under which new repressive elites, and even old repressive elites who survive to rule and repress in nominally new systems, may choose to launch broad investigations of the past. I argue that such a decision is based on two primary considerations, the presence of internally or externally based incentives (e.g., foreign aid) and the level of political control enjoyed by old elites in the new system. I apply this argument to post-Soviet Central Asia, including a detailed case study of Uzbekistan's 1999 truth commission based on domestic media analysis and local elite interviews.

In this manuscript I challenge the central argument that transitional justice in postrepressive states is largely a function of the relative power of new versus old elites. I argue instead that a new regime's will to pursue transitional justice is closely linked to its capacity to provide goods and services expected by voters, and that institutional variation plays an important role in determining how this process plays out. The mechanisms that post-oppositionists utilize to enhance their long-term political viability depend primarily on institutionally determined reward structures, which should also determine support and opposition to a given justice policy. I evaluate this argument with an in-depth examination of elite perceptions concerning transitional justice policies in two diverse post-communist states: Poland and Serbia.The past two decades have witnessed increased attention to questions of transitional justice, those legal responses to a former regime's repressive acts that follow a change in political systems. The transitional justice literature occupies a broad interdisciplinary space that spans from anthropology to political science and law. It is not surprising that much of the justice debate is focused on normative or legal aspects of justice policy. Although the literature is quite vast and varied with regard to the independent variables responsible for the employment of accountability mechanisms, theoretical arguments for how and under what conditions we should expect to see specific measures implemented remain quite limited; a common thread running through many of the existing arguments hinges on power-based constraints. According to the simplified version of this argument, the stronger the new elites are relative to their predecessors the harsher the path of justice they might be expected to follow. The logic of the argument is intuitively appealing; it is easier to imagine Vladimir Lenin holding the head of deposed Tsar Nicholas II than Boris Yeltsin holding that of Mikhail Gorbachev.Clearly a new regime's formal power structure, perhaps prejudiced by the dynamics of the transition process itself, should have at least some effect on new elites' accountability

According to scholars of resource dependency, foreign funding can weaken rather than strengthen civil society abroad, ultimately impeding its effectiveness. Yet the spate of recent “democratic revolutions” in semiauthoritarian, postcommunist states suggests that pumping foreign money into the nongovernmental sphere can be an effective strategy. In this paper Brian Grodsky argues that a critical factor in assessing the likelihood that a given organizational movement will succumb to the ills of resource dependency is the type of politicization within that movement. Those organizations composed of members primarily motivated by ideology are logically less likely to succumb to resource dependency than those organizations dominated by political aspirants intent on converting democratization into their own political power. Two case studies, communist-era Poland and contemporary Uzbekistan, provide support for this theory.