Back to the Roots : How Traditional Justice Processes Heal Collective Trauma after Conflict

In recent times traditional justice processes have become increasingly adapted to serve as transitional justice tools in post-conflict societies. The healing potential of traditional justice is becoming more recognized, nevertheless there is still little known about its impact on collective trauma and especially about the causal mechanisms behind it. To contribute to this research field, this study is guided by the following research question: Why do some traditional justice processes generate the healing of collective trauma after conflict more than others?The developed theoretical framework argues that bottom-up, locally-led traditional justice processes foster voluntary community engagement which enhances collective trauma healing. Top-down, institutionalized processes, on the other hand, are theorized to produce involuntary contact which leads to lower levels of collective healing. It is thus hypothesized that locally-led traditional justice processes are more likely to generate healing of collective trauma than institutionalized traditional justice processes. An in-depth comparative case study which uses Structured Focused Comparison, analyzes the Rwandan Gacaca trials and the traditional justice processes in Acholiland. The empirical findings lend support to the hypothesis and provide modest support to the proposed causal mechanism