Co-Opting Truth: Explaining Transitional Justice in Authoritarian Regimes

• In Event: New Directions in Transitional Justice

Abstract

Why do authoritarian regimes adopt transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions? Scholarship implies that these mechanisms are established during moments of political transformation and transition. However, nearly one-third of truth commissions have been created by autocratic regimes. We argue that autocrats deploy truth commissions as a means of minimal compliance with the now-global norm of accountability for political violence.Drawing on the autocratic resilience literature, we theorize that autocrats use truth commissions to co-opt the truth, whether they are investigating themselves or their political rivals. We expect that self-investigating truth commissions will have limited mandates, while truth commissions investigating previous regimes will have broad mandates. We additionally expect that the reports issued by self-investigating truth commissions will diverge from external accounts of violence and abuses, while commissions investigating previous regimes will converge with external accounts. To evaluate our hypotheses, we draw on a novel dataset of truth commissions established between 1970 and 2018.

Authors

• Daniel Solomon

• Kelebogile Zvobgo, University of Southern California