Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice Read Online Free PDF

emerging efforts in Colombia reflects both the combination of functions and the strong influence of international factors, especially the Inter‐American system andICC, on domestic debates. Several of the case studies in Part II also involve multiple mechanisms or proposed mechanisms, while those in Part I reflect different (and in the East Timor and Sierra Leone cases, extensive) international shaping and participation. A concluding chapter draws out the lessons learned.
    We chose the case studies because they illustrated one or more of the trends we were interested in: other places could have illustrated many of these same points, and raised others. We also looked for a balance of regions, how far along these processes were, and varying kinds of international influence. We looked for a mix of the relatively well‐known, and of places much less‐known and analyzed, at least in the English‐speaking literature. We also looked for a mix of academics and practitioners, a combination of insiders describing the processes they helped establish and guide, and outsiders with intimate and long‐standing knowledge of those processes. We brought the team of authors together (with a number of additional experts) at a workshop held at Notre Dame University's Center for Civil and Human Rights in 2004. Seeking a balance between specificity and comparability, after discussion of all the papers, we jointly came up with a rough template of questions for the chapters: questions about effectiveness, buy‐in, constraints, continuity and sustainability, synergies and gaps. The chapters each reflect these concerns in their own way.
    The study of how to come to terms with the past, to reconstruct the social and moral fiber of a society, is one of the most complex anddaunting human endeavors. It is not just a rational intellectual exercise, but one that engages our deepest and most cherished notions of what it means to define ourselves and our memory, and to live in community and society. In all these stories, determined people, faced with a window of opportunity, looked to other places for ideas, borrowed from their successes and learned from their failures, taking outside constraints into account. And then, if they had the minimal security and leeway to do so, applied their own wisdom, ingenuity, imagination and traditions to create something unique to their particular time and place. We celebrate that creativity, determination, and drive, and we dedicate this book to those, in all the countries where we work, who act to make justice, in the largest sense of the word, a reality.
     
    [1] Ruti Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy” (2003) Harvard Human Rights Journal , 16, p. 69.
     
     
    [2] On the roles of education and culture, see Sarah Warshauer Freedman et. al., “Public Education and Social Reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia”, in Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein, eds., My Neighbor, My Enemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On distributional justice, see Rama Mani, Beyond Retribution (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
     
     
    [3] See Jane Alexander, “A Scoping Study of Transitional Justice and Poverty Reduction” (January 2003), available at http://www.grc-exchange.org/docs/SSAJ56.pdf .
     
     
    [4] Reparations merits its own book, and in the initial design of this project the Notre Dame Center for Civil and Human Rights proposed two books, one on trials and truth commissions, and one on reparations. The International Center for Transitional Justice is also publishing a large study on reparations.
     
     
    [5] See M. Cherif Bassiouni, Post‐Conflict Justice (Transnational Publishers, 2002) for early efforts; for the 1970s, see Alexandra Barahona de Brito et al., eds., The Politics of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); for Spain's efforts, starting in the early 2000s, to finally confront the legacy of Francoism, see Equipo Nizkor's website, www.derechos.org/nizkor/spain