After Violence: Transitional Justice, Peace, and Democracy

The field of transitional justice has recently seen a surge of interest in the issues of effectiveness and impact. This book examines the effects of transitional justice on the development of peace and democracy. While most existing contributions are based on single case-studies or large-N quantitative approaches, this book is innovative in that it uses comparative qualitative analysis. A key question is how context matters for understanding the nature and impact of transitional justice processes. After developing a theoretical framework, the book systematically tracks the experiences of contemporary post-authoritarianUruguay and Peru and post-conflict Rwanda and Angolain dealing with their history of violence and repression through a combination of four different transitional justice mechanisms: criminal trials, truth commission, reparations, and amnesties.The principal finding is that the general claims which characterize the literature regarding the impact of transitional justice mechanisms must be modified by context and subsidiary conditions. As detailed in the four case studies, transitional justice processes are complex and dynamic and may change substantially over time. The distinction between short-term and long-term impact is therefore essential.

Bridging the transitional justice literature, democracy studies, and conflict studies, and written in virtually jargon-free language, this monograph should be of interest to academics, graduate and post-graduate students in the fields of peace and conflict, human rights, and post-conflict studies in social sciences and law. The book might also be of interest to policy makers and analysts working on transitional justice and conflict resolution.