Transitional Justice: Images and Memories. Edited by Chrisje Brants. Antoine Hol and Dina Siegel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 284 pp. 68.00 cloth.

• Date: 01 December 2015
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12173

full speech? Is not entry into its imperfect language of claiming,

each time, a terrifying pleasure?

***

Transitional Justice: Images and Memories. Edited by Chrisje Brants.

Antoine Hol and Dina Siegel. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. 284 pp.

£68.00 cloth.

Reviewed by Angi Buettner, Media Studies Program, Victoria

University of Wellington, New Zealand

Kofi Annan, chair of the Elders group of former world leaders and

former UN secretary general, was cited recently to the effect that

“climate change would leave the living envying the dead” (Vidal

2015); Annan is echoing a phrase by Nikita Khrushchev talking

about nuclear war in 1979. The point he is making is that political

and environmental turmoil caused by droughts, floods, and the

many other effects of rising temperatures will crucially transform

our social life and times. Transitional Justice makes a contribution to

the discussion of this issue, within the more general context of con-

sidering criminology as social theory tasked with analyzing a con-

temporary world marked by global political, economic, and

environmental turmoil.

The book is an edited collection in Ashgate’s series “Advances in

Criminology.” It makes a timely, well-organized, and thematically

coherent contribution to the field in two ways: via its discussion of

transitional justice and via its overarching theme of the role of crimi-

nology. Its particular strength lies in its multidisciplinary and inter-

national approach: its 13 chapters provide critiques of the various

dimensions of transitional justice by criminal lawyers, cultural

anthropologists, criminologists, political scientists, and historians.

Transitional justice is concerned with the judicial, political, and cul-

tural procedures of dealing with mass atrocity, or “the reckoning

afterwards” (p. 2), as the editors articulateit. Such procedures range

from international trials to grassroots memory initiatives, and this

collection offers a detailed map of the discursive field of transitional

justice. Each chapter is a case study of different procedures and

landscapes of transitional justice, such as the role of political apology

(Chapter Seven) and the emotional landscape of the India/Pakistan

partition (Chapter 13). Although all these case studies differ in their

disciplinary approach, rigorous research and clear editing results in

1030 Book Reviews