Transitional Justice
Melissa S. Williams, Rosemary
Nagy, Jon Elster - New York University Press, 2012
Criminal tribunals, truth commissions,
reparations, apologies and memorializations are the characteristic instruments
in the transitional justice toolkit that can help societies transition from
authoritarianism to democracy, from civil war to peace, and from state-sponsored
extra-legal violence to a rights-respecting rule of law. Over the last several
decades, their growing use has established transitional justice as a body of
both theory and practice whose guiding norms and structures encompasses the
range of institutional mechanisms by which societies address the wrongs
committed by past regimes in order to lay the foundation for more legitimate
political and legal order. In Transitional Justice, a group of leading scholars
in philosophy, law, and political science settles some of the key theoretical
debates over the meaning of transitional justice while opening up new ones. By
engaging both theorists and empirical social scientists in debates over central
categories of analysis in the study of transitional justice, it also illuminates
the challenges of making strong empirical claims about the impact of
transitional institutions. Contributors: Gary J. Bass, David Cohen, David
Dyzenhaus, Pablo de Greiff, Leigh-Ashley Lipscomb, Monika Nalepa, Eric A.
Posner, Debra Satz, Gopal Sreenivasan, Adrian Vermeule, and Jeremy
Webber.
