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| 1 |
ID:
178406
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| Summary/Abstract |
This study focuses on art projects that reflect human rights violations committed by the Guomindang (KMT) government on Taiwan during the Republic of China’s (ROC) White Terror Period between 1949 and 1991. It starts with a brief introduction to this historical period in Taiwan, followed by a discussion of artwork that seeks to preserve personal memories in the absence of official records. The paper contrasts official art projects initiated by KMT and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administrations in recent decades that aim to address the difficulties of transitional justice, such as the silence of victims, fading memories, and misapprehensions between generations, with spontaneous artwork that responds to the official narratives of past injustice.
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| 2 |
ID:
117597
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article introduces a new dataset on post-conflict justice (PCJ) that provides an overview of if, where, and how post-conflict countries address the wrongdoings committed in association with previous armed conflict. Motivated by the literature on post-conflict peacebuilding, we study justice processes during post-conflict transitions. We examine: which countries choose to implement PCJ; where PCJ is implemented; and which measures are taken in post-conflict societies to address past abuse. Featuring justice and accountability processes, our dataset focuses solely on possible options to address wrongdoings that are implemented following and relating to a given armed conflict. These data allow scholars to address hypotheses regarding justice following war and the effect that these institutions have on transitions to peace. This new dataset includes all extrasystemic, internationalized internal, and internal armed conflicts from 1946 to 2006, with at least 25 annual battle-related deaths as coded by the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset. The post-conflict justice (PCJ) efforts included are: trials, truth commissions, reparations, amnesties, purges, and exiles. By building upon the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset, scholars interested in PCJ can include variables regarding the nature of the conflict itself to test how PCJ arrangements work in different environments in order to better address the relationships between justice, truth, and peace in the post-conflict period.
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| 3 |
ID:
165437
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| Summary/Abstract |
The global transitional justice tool kit—involving the use of criminal prosecutions, amnesties, and other mechanisms to address past human rights abuse—has become a primary means for thwarting future human rights violations and consolidating democracy. Nevertheless, evidence on the consequences of transitional justice remains mixed and amenable to contradictory interpretations. Existing studies fail to adequately address issues of selection, the difference between short- and long-term effects of transitional justice mechanisms, and qualitative and quantitative differences in state practices. This article uses a new database of transitional justice mechanisms to address these concerns and test propositions from realist, constructivist, and holistic approaches to this set of policy issues. We find, among other things, that prosecutions increase physical integrity protections, while amnesties increase the protection of civil and political rights. Our analysis suggests that different transnational justice policies each play a potentially positive, but distinct, role in new democracies and in decreasing violations of human rights.
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| 4 |
ID:
177876
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| Summary/Abstract |
The essay sheds light on the role of constitutional courts in transitional justice, focusing on their role in mitigating the conflicts between transitional justice and international human rights commitments. Through a study of the Czech Constitutional Court’s case law, we demonstrate that international human rights work both as a constraint and a tool. Constitutional courts use international human rights law selectively, when it suits their reasoning and views on transition. Nevertheless, the influence of international human rights law strengthens over time, especially when supported by the adverse rulings of international bodies, and gradually prevails over transitional justice justifications.
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| 5 |
ID:
188900
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the 2021 mass protests in Colombia, and while international calls for the Colombian government to respect human rights were intensifying, Canada’s position remained somewhat ambiguous. Part of Canada’s ambiguity can be explained by a simplistic characterization of Colombia as a “weak state.” This article assesses Canada’s bilateral relationship by historizing the development of Colombia’s governance in the key overlapping sectors of security, human rights, and natural resources. From extensive fieldwork, we distinguish two competing rationalities based on the articulation of the notions of “conflict” and “dissent” with the notion of the “rule of law.” We believe that Canada’s bilateral relation with Colombia in the last decades has overlooked the contradictions that exist between democratizing rationalities and antipolitical rationalities. As a result, Canada’s foreign policy has been based on an overly simplistic conception of the relationship between development, security, and the rule of law.
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| 6 |
ID:
188910
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| Summary/Abstract |
During the 2021 mass protests in Colombia, and while international calls for the Colombian government to respect human rights were intensifying, Canada’s position remained somewhat ambiguous. Part of Canada’s ambiguity can be explained by a simplistic characterization of Colombia as a “weak state.” This article assesses Canada’s bilateral relationship by historizing the development of Colombia’s governance in the key overlapping sectors of security, human rights, and natural resources. From extensive fieldwork, we distinguish two competing rationalities based on the articulation of the notions of “conflict” and “dissent” with the notion of the “rule of law.” We believe that Canada’s bilateral relation with Colombia in the last decades has overlooked the contradictions that exist between democratizing rationalities and antipolitical rationalities. As a result, Canada’s foreign policy has been based on an overly simplistic conception of the relationship between development, security, and the rule of law.
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| 7 |
ID:
152813
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| Summary/Abstract |
Transitional justice measures are frequently expected to help promote peace in conflict-affected countries, through measures that rely heavily upon legal or legalized processes such as trials and commissions of inquiry. They are also often expected to influence or promote reform in legal processes and institutions, including the judiciary, the constitution, and legislation, in ways that are expected to help promote peace in future post-conflict states. However, not only is the evidence of the role of law in promoting peace through transitional justice a mixed one, but more importantly, the emphasis on transitional justice often overlooks the ways in which law is expected to play a role in promoting peace more broadly and in ways intertwined with transitional justice, through rule of law promotion, often by international actors, and through peace agreements that include specific institutional and governance measures, including power-sharing arrangements. These rule of law and governance measures similarly have a mixed record with regard to their effects for either short- or long-term peace. Closer analysis of the role of law and legalized mechanisms in producing or supporting peace is needed, including analysis of the types of law and mechanisms deployed. Drawing on fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Uganda, Colombia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Sudan, among others, this paper will elaborate on the challenges of using law for peace via governance and rule of law measures, as well as through transitional justice.
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| 8 |
ID:
162458
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article claims that cross-national variation in criminal violence in new democracies is highly dependent on whether elites adopt transitional justice processes to address a repressive past. State specialists in violence who repress political dissidents under authoritarian rule often play a crucial role in the operation of criminal markets and in the production of criminal violence in democracy. Some of them defect from the state to become the armed branch of criminal organizations in their deadly fights against the state and rival groups; others remain but protect criminal organizations from positions of state power; and still others use state power to fight criminals through iron-fist policies. When post-authoritarian elites adopt transitional justice processes to expose, prosecute, and punish state specialists in violence for gross human rights violations committed during the authoritarian era, they redefine the rules of state coercion and deter members of the armed forces and the police from becoming leading actors in the production of criminal violence. Using a dataset of 76 countries that transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy between 1974 and 2005, we show that the adoption of strong truth commissions is strongly associated with lower murder rates; we also find that the implementation of trials that result in guilty verdicts is associated with lower homicide rates only when the trials are jointly implemented with a strong truth commission. In contrast, amnesty laws appear to stimulate criminal violence. Our findings are particularly robust for Latin America and remain unchanged even after addressing selection effects via matching techniques.
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| 9 |
ID:
169489
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| Summary/Abstract |
Can transitional justice enhance democratic representation in countries recovering from authoritarian rule? The authors argue that lustration, a policy that reveals secret collaboration with the authoritarian regime, can prevent former authoritarian elites from extorting policy concessions from past collaborators who have been elected as politicians in the new regime. Absent lustration, former elites can threaten to reveal information about past collaboration unless the politicians implement policies these elites desire. In this way, lustration policies enable politicians to avoid blackmail and to be responsive to their constituents, improving the quality of representation. The authors show that whether lustration enhances representation depends on its severity and the extent to which dissidents-turned-politicians would suffer if the skeletons in their closets were revealed. The authors also find that the potential to blackmail politicians increases as the ideological distance between authoritarian elites and politicians decreases. They test this theory with original data from the Global Transitional Justice Dataset, which spans eighty-four countries that transitioned to democracy since 1946.
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| 10 |
ID:
168866
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| Summary/Abstract |
Several scholars have raised concerns that the institutional mechanisms through which transitional justice is commonly promoted in post-conflict societies can alienate affected populations. Practitioners have looked to bridge this gap by developing ‘outreach’ programmes, in some instances commissioning comic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve. In this article, we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation, and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 1991–2002 Civil War. Aimed at Sierra Leonean teenagers, the Report tells the story of ‘Sierrarat’, a peaceful nation of rats whose idyllic lifestyle is disrupted by an invasion of cats. Although the Report displays striking formal similarities with Art Spiegelman's Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation, in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order to explore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media like comics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation.
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| 11 |
ID:
101003
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| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In spite of recurrent calls for a more locally rooted approach to the building of 'local capacities', peace operations today are still largely under the influence of US hegemony and neoliberal values. Their aim is to transform war-torn societies along liberal lines, in both the political and the economic spheres. To achieve this, it is argued that the international community must begin by acting illiberally: rebuilding the structures of the state in order to give it the capacity to monopolize legitimate violence and manage the societal conflicts that are the unfortunate by-products of democracy and the free market. Leaders and 'high politics' are the central targets, as it is hoped that the rest of society will be affected in turn. However, this kind of social engineering from the top down can be counterproductive for the peace process and the nature of transition. Civil society should not be a secondary target: it should be the primary one. The Weberian approach to peace operations focuses too much on objective sources of legitimacy at the expense of those rooted in local, subjective perceptions of society. Since transitional justice has recently become part of the liberal peacebuilding 'package', integrated into a broad, positive definition of peace itself, transitional justice too should focus on civil society first. Building upon Habermas's notion of communicative action and Putnam's definition of social capital, this article will formulate the basis of a new approach to peace operations, one that would aim less at the rebuilding of state institutions and more at the reconstruction of social relations and unfettered dialogue between communities.
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| 12 |
ID:
189659
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| Summary/Abstract |
Transitional justice is premised on participation that allows local publics to construct, critique and have some ownership over the process. The current scholarship assumes that individuals openly express their views of the process, or that they remain silent. The scholarship has neglected a third, significant form of participation: active withholding of views by saying ‘I don’t know’. This article examines such claims to ignorance and argues that they can provide insight into participation. While both qualitative and quantitative researchers of transitional justice have observed a pervasive pattern of high ‘don’t know’ responses, such claims to ignorance have not been studied. This article develops a theoretical framework that shows that ‘don’t know’ responses are a valuable source of information and argues that they are often an expression of a lack of willingness to respond, rather than genuine ignorance. Drawing on an original corpus of data collected through inter-ethnic focus groups and surveys conducted in four former Yugoslav countries, the study demonstrates how claims to ignorance are constructed as novel manifestations of resistance, restraint or disentitlement. These point to a rejection of transitional justice, which needs to be addressed if individuals are to feel like legitimate participants in the process.
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| 13 |
ID:
151289
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| 14 |
ID:
151833
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| Summary/Abstract |
While Poles generally supported a radical approach towards truth revelation, on its own the issue did not appear to be especially salient. Poles wanted to move on from debates about the communist past and felt that the process of achieving transitional justice was a potentially destructive one. However, they also felt that they had a right to know about the past of their political elites and that collaboration with the communist security services was an especially reprehensible form of pro-regime activity. Moreover, in the public mind truth revelation was often considered in conjunction with other, more salient issues.
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| 15 |
ID:
181421
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This article investigates local perceptions of international peacebuilding in Sierra Leone and Liberia and explains the need for an inclusive framework addressing peace and justice at the same time. These neighbouring countries in West Africa not only share the burden of an intertwined conflict history but have also been described as prototypes for successful peacebuilding. However, both cases show striking differences with regard to the relative importance given to security and justice during the peace process and within the selected peacebuilding approaches. In Liberia, the peacebuilding framework was clearly sequenced, favouring security over justice. In Sierra Leone, it included a comprehensive TJ component, which was implemented alongside security-centred initiatives. In order to compare these two cases and to elaborate on the challenges of establishing both peace and justice in post-conflict settings with a more people-centred focus, we conducted expert interviews with (inter)national peacebuilding actors and opinion surveys, asking how the civilian populations themselves perceive the peace process and the effectiveness of international peacebuilding. The findings provide insights into local experiences with the inclusive peacebuilding framework implemented in Sierra Leone and the drawbacks of delaying justice and accountability in Liberia.
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| 16 |
ID:
112413
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Transitional justice literature has highlighted a negative relationship between enforced disappearances and reconciliation in post-conflict settings. Little attention has been paid to how human rights issues can become stepping-stones to reconciliation. The article explains the transformation of the Cypriot Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) from an inoperative body into a successful humanitarian forum, paving the way for the pro-rapprochement bi-communal grassroots mobilization of the relatives of the missing. By juxtaposing the experience of Cyprus with other societies confronting similar problems, the article shows how the issue of the missing can become a driving force for reconciliation. The findings indicate that a policy delinking humanitarian exhumations from the prospect of a wider political settlement facilitates positive transformation in protracted human rights problems and opens up a window of opportunity to grassroots actors.
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| 17 |
ID:
182616
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The professionalization of transitional justice (TJ) has received extensive academic attention in TJ and related international relations and peacebuilding scholarship. This article adds an element that has received hardly any attention: namely the presence of activism even among professional and usually donor-funded TJ work. I argue that noticing activism in professional contexts requires attention to the ‘everyday’, meaning to life in between, aside and beyond high politics and officially important actors, actions, processes and events. Based on field research in Sierra Leone and Kenya, I describe and discuss everyday examples of a specific form of activism, namely tacit activism that I encountered with three key interlocutors, one Sierra Leonean and two Kenyan nationals involved in professional donor-funded TJ work. Their activism was ’tacit’ in the sense that it was not part of their official project activities and my interlocutors did not advertise their extra plans and efforts to (prospective) donors. And yet, it was precisely through these tacit plans and efforts that they hoped to meet at least some of the expectations that had been raised in the context of professional TJ projects.
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| 18 |
ID:
113820
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2012.
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In analyzing peace processes in postconflict societies, scholars have primarily focused on the impact of prosecutions, truth-telling efforts, and reconciliation strategies, while overlooking the importance of individual demands for reparations. The authors argue that normative explanations of why reparations are granted in the aftermath of regime change are useful in understanding a need for reconciliation, but inadequate for explaining victim demands for compensation. The authors extend this research to study civil war settlement. In the aftermath of civil war, when some form of reparation is offered giving individuals the opportunity to seek redress of grievances, what types of loss and political and socioeconomic characteristics are likely to lead some individuals to apply for reparations but not others? Using primary data, collected through a public opinion survey in Nepal, the authors investigate individual-level demand for reparations. The findings suggest that understanding loss and risk factors may be important to civil war settlement and reconciliation.
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| 19 |
ID:
133706
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2014.
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The term 'hybrid' has been widely incorporated into recent peacebuilding scholarship to describe an array of peacebuilding endeavors, including hybrid peacekeeping missions, hybrid criminal tribunals, hybrid governance, and the hybrid peace. However, while widely deployed, hybridity itself is under-theorized and variably applied by scholars. Major concerns arise, therefore, concerning the concept's usefulness for peacebuilding theory, policy, and practice. Most problematically, while some scholars use hybridity descriptively to illustrate the mixing of international and local institutions, practices, rituals, and concepts, many today deploy hybridity prescriptively, implying that international actors can plan and administer hybridity to foster predictable social experiences in complex post-conflict states. This latter literature, therefore, assumes predictable relationships between the administration of hybrid institutions - of law, of governance, or of economics, for example - and the provision of peace-promoting local experiences of those institutions - experiences of justice, authority, empowerment, etc. This article argues that these assumptions are flawed and illustrates how a disaggregated theory of hybridity can avoid such errors. This theory distinguishes between four levels of hybridity - institutional, practical, ritual, and conceptual - characterized by their variable amenability to purposeful administration. The article illustrates how prescriptive approaches that assume direct and predictable relationships between institutions and experiences fail to recognize that concepts underpin local understandings and experiences of the world and, therefore, play a mediating role between institutions and experiences. Using examples from Sierra Leone, the article shows that while concepts are always hybrid, conceptual hybridity is inherently resistant to planned administration. As a result, internationally planned and administered hybrid institutions will not result in predictable experiences and may even result in negative or conflict-promoting experiences. The article illustrates the dangers of assuming any predictable relationships between the four levels of hybridity, and, therefore, between the administration of institutional hybrids and the predictable provision of positive local experiences.
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| 20 |
ID:
174420
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This article examines the impact of truth and reconciliation committees (TRCs) on human rights in Africa. It examines the effects of fifteen different TRCs from 1984–2014, and fills a gap in the existent literature by developing measures to assess the strength of each TRC. Many African TRCs are quite weak. Nevertheless, the study does not find that stronger TRCs are more successful in terms of human rights outcomes. While not dismissing the value of TRCs, this work discusses limitations of quantitative studies on their impact.
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