Normative and Strategic Aspects of Transitional Justice

• DOI: 10.1177/0022002706286949
• Date: 01 June 2006
• Published date: 01 June 2006
• Author: Monika Nalepa,Barry O’neill,Marek M. Kaminski
• Subject Matter: Articles

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GUEST EDITORS’NOTE: The articles in this volume were presented at the conference “Transitional

Justice,” held at the University of California, Irvine, October 29-31, 2004. Financial support from the

Center for the Study of Democracy and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies at the University

of California, Irvine, is gratefully acknowledged.

JOURNAL OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION, Vol. 50 No. 3, June 2006 295-302

DOI: 10.1177/0022002706286949

© 2006 Sage Publications

Normative and Strategic Aspects

of Transitional Justice

MAREK M. KAMINSKI

Department of Political Science

and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences

University of California, Irvine

MONIKA NALEPA

Department of Political Science

Rice University

BARRY O’NEILL

Department of Political Science

University of California, Los Angeles

Keywords: transitional justice; conflict; tribunality; reconciliation policies; democracy; authoritarianism

After atrocities, disappearances, and other human rights violations, the dictatorship

in Authoritania falls, and a new democratic regime takes power, changing the coun-

try’s name to Freedonia. How should Freedonia deal with Authoritania’s rulers and

their agents? Do they have options between forgiveness and full-scale retribution?

Should agents of the past regime be allowed political rights? Should victims be com-

pensated, and should confiscated property be restored? What role does the interna-

tional community have?

These kinds of dilemmas constitute the field of transitional justice. Transitional jus-

tice refers to formal and informal procedures implemented by a group or institution of

accepted legitimacy around the time of a transition out of an oppressive or violent

social order, for rendering justice to perpetrators and their collaborators, as well as to

their victims. Following Elster (2004), we divide transitional justice into endogenous

and exogenous. In the endogenous case, the procedures are administered by the society

itself, without external intervention. Exogenous transitional justice is administered

from the outside, typically by agents who were not engaged in the conflict, and often

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