Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding on the Ground: Victims and Ex-Combatants (Law, Conflict and International Relations) Read Online Free PDF Page A

significant amounts of time to implement, what can be done in the meantime? Humanitarian, peacebuilding, and development actors may well have to fill the gap with direct assistance. Their activities are unlikely to have a specific justice and/or reparations aspect, but nonetheless may be more timely than oft-delayed victim-centered processes.However, it is worth noting that it does not appear to be the case that, as the saying goes, “justice delayed is justice denied.” Rather, demands for justice in a range of forms—truth-telling, trials, reparations—clearly remain active, even growing, long after the original atrocities occurred, as is evident in Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Lebanon.
    Avenues for Further Research
    The eight country studies in this volume represent a range of experiences—in type and duration of conflict or abuses; in geographic location; in international peacemaking, peacebuilding, and transitional justice intervention; and, temporally, in the global evolution of peacebuilding and transitional justice. Taken together, they illustrate the diversity of experiences, of successes and failures, in the pursuit of transitional justice and peacebuilding (and, in some countries, the virtual absence of one or both in any systematic sense, but with elements of each deployed). They are, however, not comprehensive. A number of questions arise from this study that might benefit from further systematic cross-country comparisons.
    Transitional Justice Without Transition And “Atypical” Transitional Justice Or Peacebuilding
    If there is such a thing as a “typical” set of peacebuilding and transitional justice processes, our country studies demonstrate how frequently reality deviates from the typical. At least three of our eight country studies cannot be properly characterized as involving peacebuilding, for a range of reasons. Kenya did not experience a violent conflict akin to a civil war, but rather brief and severe election-related violence, albeit with an internationally mediated agreement akin to a power-sharing peace agreement. It has not experienced an international peacebuilding presence, nor have militias involved in the violence been demobilized. It is difficult to argue that it has undergone a political or post-conflict transition. Yet it has had national debate about a range of transitional justice measures and is the subject of four ICC prosecutions. Colombia has undertaken a justice and peace process involving prosecutions, truth-telling, reparations, and DDR, all linked, and yet it is not clearly in a peacebuilding situation, given that conflict with the guerrilla group FARC continues and the demobilization process currently underway is with paramilitaries which were closely aligned with the government. Lebanon’s Ta’if accord accompanied the end of the conflict, but lacks common features of a peace agreement and has not been the subject of an international peacebuilding mission, while the major militia and political force Hezbollah was not disarmed. Yet a common tool of transitional justice, the internationalized criminal tribunal, is being deployed to address, not the legacies of the conflict, but several post-conflict assassinations. All of which begs the question: What difference do transitional justice mechanisms make, not only in peacebuilding contexts, but in situations where peacebuilding has not been pursued in the traditionalsense? Future research might examine the effects of pursuing transitional justice in the absence of transition and of pursuing transitional justice in the wake of conflict with and without peacebuilding measures.
    Defining the Subject/Actor/Agent in Transitional Justice
    The implementation of transitional justice and peacebuilding measures is based on established definitions of actors—individual or collective—who are assigned specific roles in a social landscape in which human rights violations have been committed. As Engstrom notes, as transitional