In the first project of its kind to compare multiple mechanisms and combinations of mechanisms across regions, countries, and time, Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Processes, Weighing Efficacy systematically analyzes the claims made in the literature using a vast array of data, which the authors have assembled in the Transitional Justice Data Base.

Transitional justice has become the principle lens used by countries emerging from conflict and authoritarian rule to address the legacies of violence and serious human rights abuses. However, as transitional justice practice becomes more institutionalized with support from NGOs and funding from Western donors, questions have been raised about the long-term effectiveness of transitional justice mechanisms. Core elements of the paradigm have been subjected to sustained critique, yet there is much less commentary that goes beyond critique to set out, in a comprehensive fashion, what an alternative approach might look like. This volume discusses one such alternative, transformative justice, and positions this quest in the wider context of ongoing fall-out from the 2008 global economic and political crisis, as well as the failure of social justice advocates to respond with imagination and ambition. Drawing on diverse perspectives, contributors illustrate the wide-ranging purchase of transformative justice at both conceptual and empirical levels.

This book provides a unique account of the high-profile community-based restorative justice projects in the Republican and Loyalist communities that have emerged with the ending of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Unprecedented new partnerships between Republican communities and the Police Service of Northern Ireland have developed, and former IRA and UVF combatants and political ex prisoners have been amongst those involved. Community restorative justice projects have been central to these groundbreaking changes, acting as both facilitator and transformer. Based on an extensive range of interviews with key players in this process, many of them former combatants, and unique access to the different community projects this books tells a fascinating story. At the same time this book explores the wider implications for restorative justice internationally, highlighting the important lessons for partnerships between police and community in other jurisdictions, particularly in the high-crime alienated neighbourhoods which exist in most western societies, as well as transitional ones. It also offers a critical analysis of the roles of both community and state and the tensions around the ownership of justice, and a critical, unromanticized assessment of the role of restorative justice in the community.

This book explores how restorative justice is used and what its potential benefits are in situations where the state has been either explicitly or implicitly involved in human rights abuses. Restorative justice is increasingly becoming a popular mechanism to respond to crime in democratic settings and while there is a burgeoning literature on these contexts, there is less information that focuses explicitly on its use in nations that have experienced protracted periods of conflict and oppression. This book interrogates both macro and micro utilisations of restorative justice, including truth commissions, criminal justice reform and the development of initiatives by communities and other non-state actors. The central premise is that the primary potential of restorative justice in responding to international crime should be viewed in terms of the lessons that it provides for problem-solving, rather than its traditional role as a mechanism or process to respond to conflict. Four values are put forward that should frame any restorative approach – engagement, empowerment, reintegration and transformation. It is thought that these values provide enough space for local actors to devise their own culturally relevant processes to achieve longstanding peace. This book will be of interest to those conducting research in the fields of restorative justice, transitional justice as well as criminology in general.

In Assessing the Impact of Transitional Justice, fourteen leading researchers study seventy countries that have suffered from autocratic rule, genocide, and protracted internal conflict.

Dealing with the aftermath of civil conflict or the fall of a repressive government continues to trouble countries throughout the world. Whereas much of the 1990s was occupied with debates concerning the relative merits of criminal prosecutions and truth commissions, by the end of the decade a consensus emerged that this either/or approach was inappropriate and unnecessary. A second generation of transitional justice experiences have stressed both truth and justice and recognize that a single method may inadequately serve societies rebuilding after conflict or dictatorship. Based on studies in ten countries, this book analyzes how some combine multiple institutions, others experiment with community-level initiatives that draw on traditional law and culture, whilst others combine internal actions with transnational or international ones. The authors argue that transitional justice efforts must also consider the challenges to legitimacy and local ownership emerging after external military intervention or occupation.

In the last twenty years, the field of transitional justice has gone from being a peripheral concern to an ubiquitous feature of societies recovering from mass conflict or repressive rule. In both policy and scholarly realms, transitional justice has proliferated rapidly, with ever-increasing variety in terms of practical rapidly, with ever-increasing variety in terms of practical processes and analytical approaches. The sprawl of transitional justice, however, has not always produced concepts and practices that are theoretically sound and grounded in the empirical realities of the societies in question.