TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE in Spring 2021 (LW4040)

The class familiarizes students with transitional justice mechanisms, and invites students to think critically about the work conducted as well as the social and political capacity of such institutions to deliver on their promises. Designed to stimulate debate over specific cases, the first part of the course will invite students to apply the concepts learned to current situations, imagining where the field will develop from here. The second part will focus on migration, and how asylum courts assesses the notion of truth.

One of the legacies of the 20th century is the ascension of the idea that societies benefit from confronting their past or, put another way, that societies that do not address past injustice or violence risk a return of said violence. Transitional justice, which is the process societies undergo in addressing past injustice as they move from war to peace or from a repressive regime to a democracy, underwrote the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, South Africa’s lauded truth commission, lustration campaigns following the fall of the iron curtain, and the rise of international criminal justice institutions (from ad hoc tribunals like the tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda to permanent institutions like the International Criminal Court).

While the question of best practices at achieving transitional justice is still hotly debated, it is now generally accepted that truth telling and justice rendering are central aspects of social healing, and necessary for peace and reconciliation following conflict. This class critically examines the phenomenon of transitional justice, surveying the methods used, the problems inherent therein, and the assumptions underlying the application of transitional justice tools. Is truth or justice more important for social reconstruction, and are the two fundamentally at odds? If transitional justice is so rooted in rule of law processes, why is it nearly exclusively practiced by powerful countries