Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling

NANCI ADLER is professor of memory, history, and transitional justice at the University of Amsterdam and program director of genocide studies at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). She is the author of numerous titles, including Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag.

The contributors analyze the processes, products, and efficacy of a number of transitional justice mechanisms. Adler has gathered leading specialists to scrutinize the responses to and effects of violent pasts and to provide new perspectives for understanding and applying transitional justice mechanisms in an effort to stop the recycling of old repressions into new ones.

Introduction: On History, Historians, and Transitional Justice Nanci Adler Part I: Truth and Justice Chapter 1: Swinging the Pendulum: Fin de Siècle Historians in the Courts Vladimir Petrovi¿ Chapter 2: Time, Justice and Human Rights: Statutory Limitation on the Right to Truth? William A. Schabas Chapter 3: How Truth Recovery Can Benefit from a Conditional Amnesty Jeremy Sarkin Chapter 4: New Epistemologies for Confronting International Crimes: Developing the IDP Approach to Transitional Justice Stephan Parmentier, Mina Rauschenbach, and Maarten van Craen Part II: The Trial Record Chapter 5: The Spark for Genocide? Propaganda and Historical Narratives at International Criminal Tribunals Richard Ashby Wilson Chapter 6: The International Criminal Trial Record as Historical Source Thijs B. Bouwknegt Part III: The Afterlife of Transitional Justice Processes Chapter 7: Narrating (In)Justice in the Form of a Reparation Claim: Bottom-up Reflections on a Post-Colonial Setting – The Rawagede Case Nicole L. Immler Chapter 8: Collective and Competitive Victimhood as Identity in the Former Yugoslavia Christian Axboe Nielsen Chapter 9: Perpetrator-Victims: How Universal Victimhood in Cambodia Impacts Transitional Justice Measures Timothy Williams Chapter 10: Collective Crimes, Collective Memory, and Transitional Justice in Bangladesh Kjell Anderson Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Index