Transitional Justice

"Before turning specifically to Teitel’s book and the rest of the books on my list, I want to clarify that I am offering a list of the five best books on transitional justice in English. This is important to note because the scholarship and practice of transitional justice is multi-lingual, and so there are lists of books in many other languages that one could also compile. Now to Transitional Justice . I chose it because it’s a classic. It was the book that set the agenda, the questions that scholars and practitioners continue to grapple with today. It was the first book to try to systematically identify what’s extraordinary or interestingly different about responding to wrongdoing during these periods of transition away from dictatorship or conflict, and to try to do so in a way that navigates a path between realists—for whom the question of dealing with past wrongs is just reducible to questions of power—and idealists – for whom the same moral principles are applicable across all contexts. Teitel tried to show why both of these ways of thinking are flawed: that power is salient, but not the only thing salient in transitions, and that the questions that come up in transitions are not the same questions that come up in ordinary times. To do this, she considers dilemmas that arise in transitions. For example, we think of the rule of law as an ideal that provides for stability in legal rules over time, so that we can know what the rules are and thereby form reliable expectations about what will happen if we act in certain ways. Yet transitions are about disrupting expectations. They’re about revolution and normative overhaul, shifting our understanding of what law and justice requires in a society. How then should we talk about the rule of law in these moments of flux? “How should we talk about the rule of law in these moments of flux?” Teitel looks at other areas of law that map on to different kinds of responses to past wrongs. For example, criminal law deals with wrongdoing and offers a paradigm response to wrongdoers: put someone on trial and, if found guilty, punish him or her. But trials are infrequent in transitions, Teitel notes, and the way we characteristically think both in morality and in law about criminal responsibility doesn’t easily map onto wrongs that implicate groups, or that implicate the state. Criminal law also does not guide us in determining appropriate responses to those who were the foot soldiers of previous regimes, such as members of the civil service of repressive governments or dictatorships and judges during apartheid. What do we do with them? Do we bar them from serving in public capacities moving forward, or do we just allow them to continue to serve because they have skills and expertise that is needed in the new government? If you’re going to understand transitional justice, and the inherent tensions between stability and transformation and the complications inherent in attempting to draw a line between the past and future during transitions, you should begin with this book. There’s disagreement about where you mark the beginning of transitional justice as a practice. You could go back to ancient Athens, or to Nuremberg, or more recently to the transitions from military juntas in South America in the 1990s. However you slice the practice, it’s still a relatively new field of scholarship and it is, as you pointed out, deeply multidisciplinary. It encompasses scholarship in psychology, political science, law, philosophy, and criminology."