Good Governance through Transitional Justice

The EU, UN, OSCE, AU or OAS all have it: An integral Transitional Justice strategy that aims to (re-) build good governance or democratic institutions in conflict affected societies. Yet, little research has been done in drawing the link between Transitional Justice and good governance in periods of transition. There is not clear evidence that Transitional Justice instruments and mechanisms leverage good governance performance, trust in institutions or a culture of the rule of law. Do Transitional Justice measures spoil or promote establishing a Rule of Law in any given society? Do these measures predominantly address past injustice or also and equally address the ways ahead? Can trials, commissions of inquiry, memorials, reparations or restitutions de facto help to re-build civic trust in new democratic institutions and thus leverage their performance and stabilize them, or not? These are some of the main issues and questions that this section on Transitional Justice and Good Governance aims to address. We invite panels to address these questions on a theoretical, methodological and empirical level. On a theoretical level, panels may engage with the analysis of international regimes and their transitional justice policies; with recent discussions on post-transitional justice or transformative justice vs. transitional justice; as well as with questions of power and politicization of transitional justice processes that prevent the establishment of the rule of law in transitional societies. Panel proposals are further encouraged to empirically address these questions through case studies of processes from around the world. In particular, we encourage panels and papers that investigate long term transition and successful democratization processes and whether and if Transitional Justice measures have played any role in establishing democracies in, for example, Eastern Europe, Latin America or North-East Asia. This section also invites panels focusing on methodological challenges of such research on Transitional Justice, and in particular on insights drawn from approaches embedded in political science. Finally, the Section Govenros puts particular emphasis on the involvement of young scholars and early career researchers and encourages them to participate in ECPR General Conferences and workshops. As was initiated at the 2014 General Conference in Glasgow, we aim again to provide a specific panel which is exclusively devoted to the research of young scholars in order to include promising researchers and their proposals and enable an exchange with more established scholars in the field.