Writing Transitional Justice: An Empirical Evaluation of Transitional Justice Scholarship in Academic Journals

Abstract

This article examines transitional justice scholarship published in academic periodicals over a six-year period, 2003-2008, to identify the disciplines that contributed to the literature and the nature of scholarly questions they posed during a period of burgeoning scholarship. The article is the first to identify empirically which disciplines contributed to the scholarship and which were most influential among the social sciences and humanities. Law, political science, and sociology are the disciplines that dominated the field as reflected in academic journals. The most influential transitional justice articles in the social sciences and law suggested that readers were drawn to scholarly treatments that theorized the field or were analytical in nature. Scholars were wrestling with basic questions with regard to what transitional justice is and how it works. This historical perspective establishes a baseline from which to examine ongoing and future research and writing in transitional justice.

The politics of knowledge in the emergence of the transitional justice industry in Zimbabwe: the case of the Taking Transitional Justice to the People Programme, 2009–10

“…Its perceived Eurocentric approach is regarded as its weakness. In addition, most of the interventions to address the past have been state-centric (Robins, 2017) which is essentially top down, overshadowing the daily and localized processes that are organic to the people affected by conflict (Fletcher and Weinstein, 2015). This has led transitional justice to be viewed by its critics as a project focusing on political expediency, leaving out victims from being central to the enterprise.…”

Peasants' rights and agrarian violence in transitional settings: From transitional justice to transformative agrarian justice

“…In many ways this is unsurprising. The field remains tightly organized around the core priorities, concerns, concepts, tools, and literatures that informed its emergence in the 1990s as one that attempts to deal with violent pasts and build peaceful futures through mainly legal mechanisms of redress for victims of large-scale or systematic violations (Bell 2009;Fletcher and Weinstein 2015;Millar and Lecy 2016). Among its main mechanisms are trials, truth commissions, and institutional reform, which have been operationalized in the main toward dealing with past acts of political violence.…”

Mobilizing Global Knowledge

“…In this regard, conceptually guided comparative work allows for global pattern recognition in statecraft and maintenance of legitimacy in postcolonial and postimperial settings through displacement and dispossession. Lack of it, on the other hand, often locks us into regional troubleshooting exercises with short-term gains (Fletcher and Weinstein 2015).…”