When does transitional justice begin and end? Colonised peoples, liberal democracies and restorative justice

There are overlaps between restorative and transitional justice with their emphasis on inclusion, non-adversarial approaches, and values such as 'truth, accountability, reparation, reconciliation and participation' (Clamp and Doak 2012: 341, also Cunneen 2006). This chapter explores the relationship between these justice paradigms specifically in the context of Indigenous peoples in the settler colonial states of Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand. While these states may, to arying degrees, be associated with restorative justice, they are not normally considered within a transitional justice framework. This chapter argues there is some value in challenging this assumption, and that indeed settler colonial states might be seen as 'transitional societies' in their need to confront and remedy past injustices arising from their own colonial histories (Balint et al. 2014; Cunneen 2008)