Transitional Justice

Transitional justice (TJ) is a broad set of judicial and non-judicial measures aimed at supporting the societal recovery from traumatic events and the gradual transition to a more sustainable and resilient governance. Traditionally, TJ encompasses reparations, truth-telling, memorialisation policies, criminal prosecutions and institutional reforms designed to ensure guarantees of non-recurrence. As the situations in Ukraine, Colombia or Syria illustrate, increasingly more, TJ discourse and, indeed, measures emerge already amid an ongoing armed conflict or atrocity situation and not post-conflict. While this dynamic is welcomed, such frameworks are still disproportionately focused on criminal accountability and have to be more survivor-centric.

The course will critically explore with the students the opportunities and pitfalls of TJ policymaking amid an ongoing armed conflict. Its core aim is to then expand the students’ vision of accountability and discuss various context-specific modalities of ensuring justice and burgeoning reconciliation. Students will explore the case-studies of South Africa, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Nepal and the Baltic nations to realise how historical and societal undercurrents build up the legal frameworks of truth-telling and reparations. Particular attention of the course will be paid to the modalities of engagement of different survivor groups in both the design and implementation of TJ measures, of which they should be the core beneficiaries. The course will also critically assess Ukraine’s lawfare measures amid the Russian aggression, will analyse Ukraine’ emerging TJ policy and discuss how it should be re-shaped in light of the full-scale invasion.

An important connecting thread of the course will be the focus of each of its topics on prevention – which, according to Pablo de Greiff, the first UN Special Rapporteur on TJ, is an indispensable yet “the least developed pillar of transitional justice”. By the end of the course, the students will be able to assess how such a recalibration of the focus of TJ measures from past events to the future amplifies the forward-lookingness of TJ both as a complex policymaking venture and as a multilayered academic field.