Transitional Justice

Criminaltribunals, truth commissions, reparations, apologies and memorializations arethe characteristic instruments in the transitional justice toolkit that can helpsocieties transition from authoritarianism to democracy, from civil war topeace, and from state-sponsored extra-legal violence to a rights-respectingrule of law. Over the last several decades, their growing use has establishedtransitional justice as a body of both theory and practice whose guiding normsand structures encompasses the range of institutional mechanisms by whichsocieties address the wrongs committed by past regimes in order to lay thefoundation for more legitimate political and legal order. In TransitionalJustice, a group of leadingscholars in philosophy, law, and political science settles some of the keytheoretical debates over the meaning of transitional justice while opening upnew ones. By engaging both theorists and empirical social scientists in debatesover central categories of analysis in the study of transitional justice, italso illuminates the challenges of making strong empirical claims about theimpact of transitional institutions. Contributors:Gary J. Bass, David Cohen, David Dyzenhaus, Pablo de Greiff, Leigh-AshleyLipscomb, Monika Nalepa, Eric A. Posner, Debra Satz, GopalSreenivasan, AdrianVermeule, and Jeremy Webber.