Transition and Justice: An Introduction

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, political new beginnings have increasingly been linked to questions of transitional justice. The contributions to this collection examine a series of cases from across the African continent where peaceful 'new beginnings' have been declared after periods of violence and where transitional justice institutions played a role in defining justice and the new socio-political order. Three issues seem to be crucial to the understanding of transitional justice in the context of wider social debates on justice and political change: the problem of 'new beginnings', of finding a foundation for that which explicitly breaks with the past; the discrepancies between lofty promises and the messy realities of transitional justice in action; and the dialectic between logics of the exception and the ordinary, employed to legitimize or resist transitional justice mechanisms. These are the particular focus of this Introduction.

New Start or False Start? The ICC and Electoral Violence in Kenya

“…These could not be addressed by prosecuting individual perpetrators of violence, however high ranking. Actual court proceedings were therefore ill suited to fulfilling the court's lofty promise of helping societies to come to terms with past violence and master the transition to a peaceful order (Ambos et al, 2009;Anders and Zenker, 2014;Teitel, 2000). The ICC proceedings individualized the guilt for electoral violence and neglected the socio-political roots of this violence.…”

“…This is why ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo could declare that the ICC formed part of Kenya's judiciary system. 1 International criminal trials are represented as one-off interventions that help states to cope with violence that is seen as exceptional enough to evoke international concerns and justify external intervention (Anders and Zenker, 2014, the Introduction to this special issue; see also Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010).…”

“…International criminal justice is expected to effectively end impunity and thus deter future warmongers. However, these promises have to be seen in the context of the rather limited possibilities of international justice in practice (Anders and Zenker, 2014). Trials are bound by their own legal imperatives (Wilson, 2011a: 113).…”

Performing Repatriation? The Role of Refugee Aid in Shaping New Beginnings in Mauritania

“…Such mechanisms have gained importance everywhere in the world, but in Africa they are often part of larger military-humanitarian interventions which include the repatriation of refugees and peace-building interventions. As shown in the Introduction to this special issue (Anders and Zenker, 2014), academic work on transitional justice has tended to focus on the most obvious and institutionalized sites in which ideas about justice are discussed or contested, such as truth commissions or international tribunals, or neo-traditional institutions such as the gacaca in Rwanda. Yet, there are many other sites where ideas about justice and transition circulate or are negotiated, including reparations programmes (which may include land restitutions, financial compensation, etc.…”

New Law Against an Old State: Land Restitution as a Transition to Justice in Post‐Apartheid South Africa?

“…on some profound continuity with normality and the mundane which, in turn, allows reading, and motivating, behaviour in all too familiar termswhatever such behaviour may say of itself (see Anders and Zenker, 2014, in the Introduction to this issue). Seen in this light, singular events may acquire a different selectivity and connectivity, that is, different pasts and potential futures (Luhmann, 1995: 215), depending on the peculiar logic(s) through which they are contextualized.…”