Searching for Truth in the Transitional Justice Movement

This book re-imagines transitional justice as a movement, and explains why truth commissions are being promoted and created.

Jamie Rowen (Author)

9781107108769, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 August 2017

192 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 1.5 cm, 0.42 kg

'The flexibility of legal concepts - intervention, transitional justice, and truth commissions - has spawned a loose movement of professionals who insert differing priorities into global justice. Rowen's remarkable research across multiple continents uncovers a paradoxical truth of transitional justice: the 'continuing appeal' of truth commissions despite 'disappointing outcomes'. These findings are bracing and important for scholars and practitioners of international justice and human rights.' Mark Fathi Massoud, author of Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan

Searching for Truth in the Transitional Justice Movement examines calls for a truth commission to redress the brutal war during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the decades-long armed conflict in Colombia, and US detention policies in the War on Terror. In so doing, it argues that transitional justice is an idea around which a loosely structured movement emerged and professionalized, making truth commissions a standard response to mass violence. By exploring how this movement developed, as well as efforts to make truth commissions in the Balkans, Colombia, and the US, this book explains different processes through which political actors translate new legal ideas such as transitional justice into political action. Further, it reveals how the malleability of transitional justice and truth commissions is both an asset and a liability for those hoping to ensure accountability, improve survivor well-being, and prevent future violence.

1. Searching for truth
2. Building a transnational movement
3. Disruption: a truth commission in Bosnia and Herzegovina
4. Transformation: the politics of peace in Colombia
5. Decoupled: transitional justice in the War on Terror
6. The power of legal ideas.

Subject Areas: Settlement of international disputes [LBH], Private international law & conflict of laws [LBG], Public international law [LBB], International law [LB]