Genealogies of Transitional Justice

Abstract

The concept of transitional justice has been on an upward trajectory for three decades, attesting to its broad empirical applicability, its analytical potential, and the normative attraction it holds. At the same time, conceptual confusion is widespread as “transitional justice” functions as shorthand for both a specific type of event and the research on these events. The present chapter untangles these overlapping understandings by exploring the multiple genealogies of “transitional justice” as historical event, normative project, and heuristic lens. In the first section of this chapter, a conceptual history addresses the prehistory, emergence, and evolution of “transitional justice” as an analytical category. The second section offers an inevitably incomplete survey of transitional justice as a sequence of historically discrete events. The final section tries to integrate outlying cases which run afoul of common expectations as to what constitutes transitional justice, and reconceptualizes the term as a heuristic instrument rather than an empirical phenomenon or an academic field. Avoiding linear, teleological, and normative assumptions, this chapter proposes to understand transitional justice as a question rather than an answer.