New Directions in Transitional Justice

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Accountability for historical political violence has become a consequential norm over the past century. Civil society actors, foreign governments, and international organizations now not only expect transitional justice (TJ); they also demand it. Accordingly, national governments have implemented a range of tools, ostensibly to reckon with widespread and systematic human rights abuses and their legacies. These tools include trials, truth commissions, reparations, and institutional reforms. Much scholarship views political transformation as a prerequisite for TJ. However, there is a lack of systematic theory and empirical evidence about the extent to which TJ mechanisms are deployed in transformational settings and the degree to which they are themselves transformative.

The papers on this panel engage with the potentially competing objectives of justice and regime stability. The junior and senior scholars on this panel bridge the fields of Comparative Politics and International Relations by analyzing how states’ internal politics and institutions emerge from, intersect with, and contradict stated commitments to the now-global norm of accountability for political violence.

The papers in this panel approach this fundamental theoretical problem of politics and justice using a diversity of data and methods, including original datasets, quantitative and formal models, qualitative case studies, and interpretivist methods, to study how states can use TJ mechanisms to both distort and support political transformation. In so doing, the papers offer a range of perspectives on the ways in which domestic actors can interpret, adjust, distort, and exploit gaps in TJ to balance expectations of accountability with domestic political imperatives. These papers thus have important normative and empirical implications for the future study of TJ.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 45: Human Rights

Individual Presentations

• Handle Our Own Business: Bargaining in the Shadow of the ICC - Genevieve Bates, University of Chicago

• Do Truth Commissions Contribute to Democratic Governance? How? - Geoff Dancy, Tulane University; Oskar Timo Thoms, Simon Fraser University

• Cycles of Conflict: Studying Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice Processes - Shauna N Gillooly, University of California, Irvine

• Co-Opting Truth: Explaining Transitional Justice in Authoritarian Regimes - Daniel Solomon; Kelebogile Zvobgo, University of Southern California

Chair

• Cyanne E. Loyle Pennsylvania State University

Discussant

• Cyanne E. Loyle Pennsylvania State University