The Changing Transitional Justice Landscape: Debating Accountability and the Efficacy of Trials

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

In the two decades since transitional justice (TJ) has emerged in academic scholarship, many of its initial claims are being reevaluated by scholars across a variety of fields. In this panel, historians and political scientists examine several distinct regional and historical contexts in order to challenge the idea that TJ mechanisms designed with formal legal accountability in mind are necessarily the most effective or just responses to crisis or conflict.
In El Salvador, Risa Kitagawa uses experimental evidence to explore how notions about fairness and retribution underlying trials for wartime crimes moderate citizen perceptions of the state. Turning to a European people’s tribunal for Latin American Dirty War crimes, Paul Katz analyzes popular visions of rights that, while lacking formal legal authority, did have significant impact on understandings of transnational state violence. Finally, Debbie Sharnak evaluates differences in rural versus urban rights claims and experiences based on the debate surrounding the 1989 amnesty law in Uruguay.
Taken together, these papers demonstrate that local, national, and transnational transitional justice mechanisms elide straightforward legitimacy narratives. The panel instead argues for a more nuanced understanding of how justice can and has operated in various post-conflict contexts across Latin America. We seek to move toward an analysis of TJ that does not take for granted the often narrow definitions of accountability that undergird it, advocating for a more flexible understanding of the purposes of TJ and the metrics by which its success can be measured.

Sub Track

• Human Rights and Memory

Session Organizer

• Debbie V Sharnak, Harvard University

Chair

• Peter Winn, Tufts University

Discussant

• Kathryn A Sikkink, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• Justice as Fairness? The Impact of Human Rights Trials on State Legitimacy - Risa Kitagawa, Northeastern University

• Transitional Justice Beyond the Law: Imperialism, Genocide, and the Second Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America, 1974-1976 - Paul R Katz, Columbia University

• Justice for Whom?: Debating the 1986 Amnesty Law in Urban versus Rural Uruguay - Debbie V Sharnak, Harvard University