Varieties of Transitional Justice

Transitional Justice is multi-disciplinary field of research that comprises many approaches and disciplines (political science, history, psychology, international law, sociology) that investigate the diverse ways in which to deal with systematic human rights approaches (e.g. trials, lustrations, truth commissions, amnesties). Given the fact that TJ as a “field” is still developing, our section aims to address the major lacunae of the current scientific discussion/s: (1) theoretical approaches to justice, (2) comparative case studies of mechanisms and country cases, (3) postmodern/critical approaches, (4) young researchers’ panel and TJ and (5) special regional focus: The MENA region in an early TJ perspective. We invite panel and paper propsoals that cover this wide range of approaches, theories and comparative studies in following areas: (1) Theories of TJ. Here our aim is to invite in particular sociological as well as philosophical (e.g. John Rawls, Juergen Habermas, Michel Foucault) contributions to arrive at a more theory-guided (deductive) framework for also normatively explaining or guiding TJ processes in the future. (2) Comparative case-studies are not in abundant supply although only the comparison of diverse instruments (e.g. tribunals) of TJ applied in the same country or the comparison of the same mechanisms applied in different countries/environments would enable us to thoroughly investigate the conditions of (domestic or international) success in establishing TJ regimes. (3) While the explanation of TJ processes is still mostly single-case oriented, descriptive and empirical rich, post-modern perspectives are not very common in the current literature on TJ. However, a critical investigation of the processes as well as diverse perspectives of institutions who foster or hamper a TJ process on the international, domestic or local level; as well as on perpetrators and victims would certainly help us to better understand the potential and limits of the diverse discursive narratives (mainstream and dissidency) to democracy, stability, peace or reconciliation. (4) The SG puts particular emphasis on the involvement of young scholars and early stage researchers and encourages them to come to ECPR conferences and workshops. We aim to provide a special forum at each conference, which is exclusively devoted to the research of young scholars and therefore solely managed by the SG’s young scholars representative to include promising researchers and their proposals at a rather early stage of their research. (5)For about two to three years, the social and political revolutions and current violent conflicts in the MENA regions (Bahrain, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Egypt. Maroco,etc.) have been at the center of political attention. The decades ahead of the transition as well as the transition itself have often been accompanied with massive human rights violations. In this panel, our aim is to shed an early first light on the judicial as well as non-justiciable dimension of the atrocities and how they are dealt with in that region.