The Role and Impact of Norms in Transitional Justice Processes

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, international relations scholars have witnessed a revival of genocides (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Somalia etc.) as well as a new wave of democratic transformations (Latin America, Eastern Europe). The former but also some of the latter were accompanied with large scale human rights violations. The central question therefore was: How can people, societies, and states reconcile with one another after a conflict in which gross injustices occurred? A range of judicial as well as non-judicial approaches, e.g. truth commissions, reparation payments, as well as public apologies, emerged in order to come to terms with the past and to prevent the re-eruption of violent conflicts. Yet, little is known about the concrete functioning of these mechanisms in general: The first wave of research on Transitional Justice has produced an essential number of empirically rich, inductively informed, as well as descriptively thick country studies that, however, lacked the potential for a wider generalization of the findings. Few comparative studies as well as few theoretically-informed analyses are available in order to gain a more systematic knowledge of conditions, mechanisms and normative foundations of Transitional Justice. The panel aims to address this gap systematically investigating the dimensions, impact, and role of norms in reconciliation- and transition processes from a theoretical as well as comparative perspective. It addresses the following questions: Do international and domestic understandings of justice complement or confront each other? How do punitive expectations of justice relate to restorative aspects in reconciliation processes? On what kind of norms are Transitional Justice processes based in general? Is there a strategic function of norms in reconciliation processes? And finally: Do norms influence reconciliation processes, how, to what extent, and at what stages of transition in particular?

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