What we talk about when we talk about transitional justice—and what we don’t

This chapter reprises and re-evaluates the origin story of transitional justice. It discusses the play of the post-atrocity “way of worldmaking” gifted by Nuremberg (crimes against humanity must be punished), against that bestowed by the end of the Cold War (violent authoritarians must be pacified rather than punished). It concentrates attention on a set of late-Cold War political conditions largely ignored by the field to date. It spotlights the Reagan Doctrine, an important artifact of late US Cold War foreign policy, in order to show how the political allegiances and norms it generated shaped early debates and cases in transitional justice. The chapter draws on examples from a range of constitutive events and artifacts in the emergence of the field, namely, founding debates and official documents which preceded and shaped important early cases in Chile (1990) and South Africa (1996) respectively. This early context—history, politics, and debates—provides a rich snapshot of a new way of worldmaking at the moment of its inception. This chapter argues that this history gifted transitional justice with a distinctive, modular, way of addressing atrocity that was designed to transcend political differences. It argues further that this modular way of knowing went on to indelibly imprint the field, and facilitated the proliferation of transitional justice far beyond the contexts it was originally set up to address. Finally, the chapter argues that the features of transitional justice that have made it so successful have also led to an over-extension of the field and an exhaustion of its meaning.