This paper will put forward 3 key arguments that counter existing scholarship. The first will be to introduce a conceptual distinction between transitional and retrospective justice. We will argue that justice measures need to be differentiated in terms of whether they deal with more recent or more distant wrongdoings of an erstwhile regime (hence, transitional vs retrospective). Second, we will maintain that rather than looking at the causes or effects of individual policies in a country, we need to examine the full spectrum of truth and justice policies going on. In other words, we advocate looking for ‘patterns’ of truth and justice. Lastly, in order to map out such patterns, we propose an operationalizable matrix that distinguishes between targets of justice and levels of justice. The paper will conclude with an illustration of all of these arguments via a comparative analysis of the three post-communist Baltic states.
