Law and Politics in Transitional Justice

Abstract

The tension between law and politics places transitional justice under crosspressures. The impetus to hold perpetrators legally accountable for atrocities and major rights violations has emerged in part from the expectation that subjecting political behavior to the apolitical judgment of law will exert a civilizing effect. As demands for accountability have risen, politics has played a central role at every step. The past decade has seen a flourishing of research in empirical political science on the relationship between law and politics in postconflict and postauthoritarian justice. This research has tried to explain the turn to individual legal accountability and the development of norms and institutions for accountability. Research has stressed the role of politics in shaping the implementation of trials and other modes of accountability. It has also examined the consequences of these modes of accountability. We address research on each of these topics. 303 Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 2015.18:303-327. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by WIB6013 -Freie Universitaet Berlin -FU Berlin on 05/15/15. For personal use only.

Mobilizing Global Knowledge

“…As such, it is puzzling that for many decades, scholarship concentrated mainly on the "corrective" aspects of legal and semi-legal practices associated with transitional justice measures and movements in the global south. This preference led to a widespread instrumentalization of our understanding of sociopolitical change in the aftermath of mass conflict and displacement (Vinjamuri and Snyder 2015;MacDonald 2017). In mainstream literature on forced migration, which is often event specific, rarely has enough attention been paid to the issue of creating new forms of justice capable of questioning the legitimacy of prior political or legal practices that led to both institutional and societal involvement in and subsequent denial of mass violence leading to the very events of displacement.…”

Judicial Reform – A Neglected Dimension of SSR in El Salvador

“…Thus, there are conflicting goals that might produce deadlock on the ground. Second, there is a debate on the relevance of transitional justice and the rule of law reforms for peace (Buckley-Zistel et al 2015;Vinjamuri and Snyder 2015;Sriram 2017). Theoretically transitional justice mechanisms can be seen as an important link between the violent past and the non-violent future.…”

Evaluating the Evaluators: Transitional Justice and the Contest of Values

“…103 The study also confirms Vinjamuri and Snyder's observation that the justifications for TJ do not map neatly onto different professional or disciplinary identities. 104 Lawyers do not all justify TJ on the basis of legal principle, nor political scientists on the basis of consequences.…”