From Molehills to Mountains (and Myths?): A Critical History of Transitional Justice Advocacy

At a time when transitional justice discourse is increasingly divided between advocates who celebrate its inherently progressive evolution and champion its constant expansion, and more agnostic theorists and practitioners who counsel against perceived utopianism and urge a more sceptical empirical assessment of the ever-greater claims made for its mechanisms, it is worthwhile examining how the phenomenon has developed in the years since its foundation in the late 1980s. In just over two decades, it has emerged from relatively circumscribed foundational debates over the efficacy of any accountability response in transitional societies to undergo an often bitter doctrinal ‘truth versus justice’ debate over best practice and on to the present-day’s extraordinarily assertive and quasi-hegemonic discourse absorbing and assimilating wildly divergent policies of peace-building, development and psychosocial therapeutics. As the field becomes a contradictory body of ideas, attitudes and practices to which only the title ‘transitional justice’ gives coherence, this constant revolution has stimulated an observable reaction among scholars and professionals who inveigh against the unjustified idealism that has hitherto characterised the field, and who counsel empirical assessment of the virtuous effects more easily presumed than proven. This article employs a critical, four-stage historical treatment of the interaction between advocacy and transitional politics. It concludes that transitional justice’s development is best understood not as an evolutionary process, but rather as a series of principled and evermore creative adaptations to still-pervasive political limitations. Its apparent utopianism might better be comprehended as the search for diverse and discrete heterotopias.