War Exposure, Perpetrator Identity and Attitudes towards Transitional Justice

• In Event: Reintegration and Reconciliation in the Wake of Islamist Armed Conflicts

Abstract

Transitional justice aims to meet the needs of victims and repair relations broken by violence. Yet our knowledge about what drives victims’ transitional justice preferences remains limited. Under what conditions do victims favor restorative as opposed to retributive justice for perpetrators? In this paper, we use a survey experiment to examine the effects of shared ethno-religious group identity between victim and perpetrator on support for retributive and restorative justice mechanisms in a war affected sample of refugees escaping armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq. We further examine whether the level of war exposure reported by participants and their attribution of harm to in-group and out-group perpetrators moderates the effects of shared identity on transitional justice preferences. Our findings suggest that shared identity between victim and perpetrator decreases support for harsh punishments and increases support for restorative justice mechanisms, including the forgiveness of perpetrators, the participation of perpetrators in truth commissions in exchange for no prosecution, and large-scale amnesties for perpetrators if that would help to ensure a lasting peace. Moreover, greater war exposure enhances these parochial effects. Importantly, however, attributing harm to the ingroup versus the outgroup plays an important role in shaping attitudes towards transitional justice as well. The findings suggest that blaming ingroup perpetrators for one’s victimization reduces ingroup bias in transitional justice preferences in the aftermath of civil wars.

Authors

• Jonathan Hall, Uppsala University

• Thorsten Rogall, UBC