Book Review, Marcos Zunino, Justice Framed: A Genealogy of Transitional Justice (2019)

Transitional justice initiatives, broadly speaking, respond to systematic human rights abuses. These initiatives take multiple shapes and forms. This means that the actual practice of transitional justice is diverse and organic. Transitional justice discourse, however, is aspirational, normative and selective. It is less heterogeneous and far more directive. Marcos Zunino’s eye-opening book, Justice Framed, is about gaps between narrative discourse and tangible practice. It is about the effects of discourse on practice. More pointedly, Justice Framed is about how discourse ‘surfaces’ certain kinds of practices of the past while sidelining and ignoring others. Hence, to come full circle, this book is about how discourse affects the recorded history, official content, epistemology and genealogy of transitional justice. Only some initiatives of the past are retroactively bestowed with the edifying crown of ‘transitional justice’. The effects of discourse are therefore constrictive, judgmental and ideological