Chapter 27: Transitional Justice

Paola Cesarini

Transitional justice Over the last three decades, close to eighty countries have experienced democratization and, in turn, the related challenges of dealing with previous authoritarian rulers and their crimes. In the face of this growing universe of cases, ‘transitional justice’ has rapidly grown from a minor area of investigation into a massive inter-disciplinary field 1 of study, full of promising avenues for academic research and practical experimentation. At the same time, the discipline of transitional justice is still in its adolescence – that is, eager to grow up, yet insecure about its core identity. And while most scholars and activists in the field concur that unresolved problems of transitional justice have a lasting impact on new democracies (Teitel, 2000: 9) significant disagreement remains on key conceptual and theoretical issues. Transitional justice and comparative politics often intersect. Thus, for example, most theories in the field touch on political variables and adopt ...

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