Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions and Chronicling

Since the 1980s, an array of legal and non-legal practices-labeled Transitional Justice-has been developed to support post-repressive, post-authoritarian, and post-conflict societies in dealing with their traumatic past. In Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice, the contributors analyze the processes, products, and efficacy of a number of transitional justice mechanisms and look at how genocide, mass political violence, and historical injustices are being institutionally addressed. They invite readers to speculate on what (else) the transcripts produced by these institutions tell us about the past and the present, calling attention to the influence of implicit history conveyed in the narratives that have gained an audience through international criminal tribunals, trials, and truth commissions. Nanci Adler has gathered leading specialists to scrutinize the responses to and effects of violent pasts that provide new perspectives for understanding and applying transitional justice mechanisms in an effort to stop the recycling of old repressions into new ones. Contents - Introduction: On history, historians, and transitional justice / Nanci Adler - Swinging the pendulum : fin-de-siècle historians in the courts / Vladimir Petrović - Time, justice and human rights : statutory limitation on the right to truth? / William A. Schabas - How truth recovery can benefit from a conditional amnesty / Jeremy Sarkin - New epistemologies for confronting international crimes : developing the information, dialogue, and process (IDP) approach to transitional justice / Stephan Parmentier, Mina Rauschenbach, and Maarten van Craen - The spark for genocide? : propaganda and historical narratives at international criminal tribunals / Richard Ashby Wilson - The international criminal trial record as historical source / Thijs B. Bouwknegt - Narrating (in)justice in the form of a reparation claim : bottom-up reflections on a post-colonial setting : the Rawagede case / Nicole L. Immler - Collective and competitive victimhood as identity in the former Yugoslavia / Christian Axboe Nielsen - Perpetrator-victims : how universal victimhood in Cambodia impacts transitional justice measures / Timothy Williams - Collective crimes, collective memory, and transitional justice in Bangladesh / Kjell Anderson