Addressing Injustice

Injustice ranges from isolated cases of theft and murder to discrimination that has soaked into the structures of a society. Depending on the grievance, injustice can be very difficult to recognize and eliminate. Yet remedying injustice is key to successful conflict resolution.

Beyond Intractability Essay

After Arusha : Gacaca Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda

"The Gacaca courts were resurrected in Rwanda as an indigenous form of restorative justice. The principles and process of these courts hope to mitigate the failures of 'Arusha Justice' at the tribunal and seeks to punish or reintegrate over one hundred thousands genocide suspects. Its restorative foundations require that suspects will be tried and judged by neighbours in their community." -- from Abstract

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After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond

"In 'After Genocide', leading scholars and practitioners analyse the political, legal and regional impact of events in post-genocide Rwanda within the broader themes of transitional justice, reconstruction and reconciliation. Given the forthcoming fifteenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and continued mass violence in Africa, especially in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Uganda, this volume is unquestionably of continuing relevance." -- from Website

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After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide

For 25 years, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge have avoided responsibility for their crimes against humanity. For 30 long years, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, the Cambodian people suffered from a war that has no name. New findings demonstrate that the death toll was approximately 2.2 million--about a half million higher than commonly believed. Detailing the struggle to come to terms with what happened in Cambodia, Etcheson concludes that real justice is not merely elusive, but in fact may be impossible, for crimes on the scale of genocide. Despite regular denial of knowledge of the mass killing among the surviving leadership of the Khmer Rouge, Etcheson demonstrates that they were not only aware of it, but that they personally managed and directed the killing.

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After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa

Looking back at South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), this collection has two primary goals. First, it aims to provide an assessment of the TRC experience. Second, it asks where South Africa should go from here.

Book Summary

Amnesty

Many argue that amnesty can allow societies to wipe the slate clean after war crimes or other human rights abuses, to put the past behind them in favor of the future. Others argue, that this condones the perpetrators' actions and encourages such behavior.

Beyond Intractability Essay

Bamboozling the US Public About the ICC

"The US inspired the world at Nuremberg by demanding that never again would crimes against humanity be allowed to go unpunished. We weaken our standing in the world when we insist that law applies to everyone else but not to the United States. No nation and no person has a sovereign right to commit crimes against humanity with impunity. The best way to protect our military, and the peace of the world, is through universal and equal enforcement of the rule of law for everyone." -- from Website

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Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence

The rise of collective violence and genocide is the twentieth century's most terrible legacy. Writing with informed, searching prose of the extraordinary drama of the truth commissions in Argentina, East Germany, and most notably South Africa; war-crime prosecutions in Nuremberg and Bosnia; and reparations in America, Minow looks at the strategies and results of these riveting national experiments in justice and healing.

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Beyond Retribution: Seeking Justice in the Shadows of War

Establishing justice in post-conflict societies entails three inter-related principles: legal justice, rectifactory justice, and distributive justice. Mani examines each of these in turn.

Book Summary

Burying the Past Making Peace or Doing Justice: Must We Choose?

Beginning with a conceptual approach to justice and forgiveness and moving to an examination of reconciliation on the political and on the psychological level, the collection examines the quality of peace as it has been forged in the civil conflicts in Rwanda, South Africa, Chile, Guatemala and Northern Ireland.

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Cambodia Confronts the "G" Word

The horrors of the Khmer Rouge's rule may be in the past, but the question of whether its crimes amount to genocide lingers on. The term genocide is often used reflexively to describe the Khmer Rouge's rule of terror that led to the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians from overwork, starvation, and murder from 1975 to 1979. It was not, however, one of the charges former Khmer Rouge leaders had faced in the three-year-old U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal. This is changing, though, and the new move is controversial.

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Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective

Transitional justice varies along a scale, with pure legal justice and pure political justice constituting the poles. Closing the Books uses historical examples in an attempt to understand the sources of variation.

Book Summary

Confronting Past Human Rights Violations: Justice vs. Peace in Times of Transition

Because pursuing justice risks destabilization as some actors are threatened with punishment, many argue that justice must be foregone in the interest of peace. Sriram rejects this argument, suggesting instead that the interaction between justice and peace is continuous and that justice need not be completely rejected in order to establish peace.

Book Summary

Darfur

There are four ongoing cases in the Court's Darfur investigation. Three of the suspects have still not been arrested, but three others voluntarily responded to summons to appear before the Court. This site links to documents concerning these cases; everything from ICC statements and reports to goverment and inter-governmental documents to factsheets and much more.

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Documenting Brutalities to Change the World

"When you hear the word 'survivor', you usually think of that reality TV show pitting contestants against one another on some remote island. In Rwanda, 'survivor' refers to those who survived the genocide. I had the privilege of visiting a survivor's village an hour outside of Kigali to hear from women who have survived extreme sexual violence." -- from Website

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Gacaca Justice - Rwanda

According to this video, Rwanda's Gacaca Courts have become a model for transitioning into a peaceful society. Fifteen years after the genocide and with thousands of culprits sentenced by the courts, is Rwanda ready to surmount its tragic history?

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Genocide Verdicts in Srebrenica Killings

Judges at the Hague handed down two rare genocide convictions, sentencing two security officers for the Bosnian Serb Army to life in prison for their roles in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the worst single episode in a decade of war that left 100,000 dead and tore the Balkans apart. In Serbia and Bosnia, many still deny the magnitude of the killings at Srebrenica and of the role of both the Serbian and Bosnian Serb leadership in the planning and final capture of the United Nations protected zones.

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Getting Even or Getting Equal? Retributive Desires and Transitional Justice

This article examines the effect that different policy interventions of transitional justice have on the desires of the victims of human rights violations for retribution. The retributive desires assessed in this article are conceptualized as individual, collective, and abstract demands for the imposition of a commensurate degree of suffering upon the offender. We suggest a plausible way of reducing victims' retributive desires. Instead of "getting even" in relation to the suffering, victims and perpetrators may "get equal" in relation to their respective statuses, which were affected by political crimes. The article hypothesizes that the three classes of transitional justice: (1) reparation that empowers victims by financial compensation, truth telling, and social acknowledgment; (2) retribution that inflicts punishment upon perpetrators; and (3) reconciliation that renews civic relationship between victims and perpetrators through personal contact, apology, and forgiveness; each contributes to restoring equality between victims and perpetrators, and in so doing decreases the desires that victims have for retribution.

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Global Justice! The 2010 ICC Review Conference and the Future of International Justice in Africa

This article describes the work of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to date and looks at the issues that will need to be considered at the May 2010 ICC review conference in Kampala Uganda if the ICC is going to become a successful provider of real justice for all, not just for some.

Personal Reflection

Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe: Ghosts at the Table of Democracy

This work emerged from a conference in Denmark, and explores the legacy of past trauma in countries that do not receive much attention in transitional justice literature.

Book Summary

In Support of the Legal Determination of Genocide

This comment responds to Robert M. Hayden's concerns by highlighting the importance of contextualizing definitions of genocide and by advocating that determinations of genocide be legally defined. Sari Wastell argues that legal determinations are contingent and contestable when established as "adjudicated facts," that the law is the most appropriate venue for broaching these debates, and that the proposed genocide denial legislation that worries Hayden cannot target legitimate inquiry into the coherence of legal definitions of the crime of genocide. While reports, rumors, and accusations of genocidal activity might well be the impetus for the establishment of ad hoc tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the existence of these international bodies is precisely aimed at determining the "truth" of these claims in a legal sense.

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Informal Justice

Informal Justice evaluates the promise and shortcomings of informal justice systems and explores the relationship between informal justice, formal justice, state power, and social control.

Book Summary

International Center for Transitional Justice

"The International Center for Transitional Justice is an international non-profit organization specializing in the field of transitional justice. ICTJ works to help societies in transition address legacies of massive human rights violations and build civic trust in state institutions as protectors of human rights." -- from Website

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International War Crimes Tribunals

These are tribunals designed to prosecute war crimes such as genocide, torture, and rape. Such tribunals are becoming increasingly common and are used instead of or in conjunction with truth commissions to try to move beyond the violence of many ethnic conflicts and allow the society to build peace.

Beyond Intractability Essay

Justice Conflicts

Perceived injustice is a frequent source of conflict. It is usually characterized by the denial of fundamental rights. This is an introductory essay to the justice section of the website.

Beyond Intractability Essay

Justice for Cambodia? Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunals for the Future Direction of International Criminal Justice

This article examines the Extraordinary Chambers of the Court of Cambodia (ECCC) -- the tribunal recently created to try Khmer Rouge leaders for the Cambodian "killing fields." It not only examines the potential effectiveness in the Cambodian context, but also the larger role of hybrid local/international tribunals in the context of the ICC and other war crimes tribunals.

Case Study

Justice for Genocide Should Have No Expiry Date

"So what kind of justice is there for victims of genocide? In the long road towards some moral standard, one that includes the victims as part of the atrocity, an admission of responsibility by the perpetrator is a start..." -- from Website

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Justice in Perspective

"This site is a project of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) and contains an overview of the transitional justice processes which have been, and are currently being, undertaken or explored by various countries. The information is prepared to provide a quick overview of the different institutions and processes and easy access to key sites." -- from Website

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Land and Property Rights in the Peace Process

Land and property rights disputes can be very difficult to resolve, especially in transitional societies where land ownership is murky. Often two (or more people) say they own a particular piece of land, and all the evidence of ownership has been destroyed. Systems must be established to resolve competing claims that are seen to be fair and effective.

Beyond Intractability Essay

Lustration

The term "lustration" derives from the Latin for "purification." In this essay, it refers to a means by which some countries deal with a legacy of human rights abuses.

Beyond Intractability Essay

Making "Never Again" a Reality

"The Responsibility to Protect doctrine, introduced in 2001 and ratified by the world in 2005, reinforces the idea that nations must protect rather than harm their populations and the rest of the world has an obligation to help nations carry out this protection mandate and intervene when necessary to halt genocide and mass atrocities. The International Criminal Court, created in 1998, and other international tribunals can (and do) punish individuals found guilty of creating and/or carrying out genocide and mass atrocities." -- from Website

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Meta-Conflict Resolution

Many conflict resolvers emphasize mediation, dialogue, or problem solving workshops as solutions to conflict. But intractable conflicts usually need a much more comprehensive approach. This article describes such an approach and articulates the various roles that must be carried out to successfully transform these conflicts.

Beyond Intractability Essay

Military Force Restructuring

Most societies have had on-going tensions between the military and civilians. Although most people want to maintain large, powerful forces able to protect against enemies, those forces should not be able to consume their societies.

Beyond Intractability Essay

Moral Victories: How Activists Provoke Multilateral Action

"This book combines four analytical threads: an account of the development of a transnational human rights regime; a detailed discussion of human rights intervention in El Salvador and Guatemala (with comparative references to Cambodia, Argentina, and briefly, Colombia); an analysis of the role of civil society in the form of transnational networks of human rights activists in making human rights intervention possible and successful; and a set of propositions about what makes human rights missions succeed or fail." -- from Website

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Negotiating Peace for Darfur: An Overview of Failed Processes

This essay evaluates the various attempts at peacemaking in Darfur, examining why they have failed and what will need to change if peace is to be achieved.

Case Study

Overcoming Intolerance in South Africa: Experiments in Democratic Persuasion

Political tolerance is important for the survival of a democratic state. Unfortunately, tolerance is often in short supply during the transition to democracy. Gibson explores the interaction between political tolerance and democracy in South Africa.

Book Summary

Prosecuting Agression

"Based on my experience as an international prosecutor, and speaking as a strong supporter of the International Criminal Court, I think it would be a mistake to add the crime of aggression to the Court's docket now...By any measure, the I.C.C. has gotten off to a strong start in generating international support and demonstrating its potential to address the problem of impunity for serious international crimes. But it also has encountered charges of politicization and is still learning, as an institution, how to exercise effectively its jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes." -- from Website

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Rape Warfare: the Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

In this highly personal account, Beverly Allen provides a compelling testimony and analysis of the horrifying phenomenon of "a military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide."In Rape Warfare, Allen examines the complexity of identity in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia through the accounts of rape/death camp survivors and those who work to help them. Allen concludes with an impassioned argument for bringing to trial the perpetrators of genocidal rape. By turns personal, polemical, and informative, Rape Warfare is a lucid guide for anyone seeking to make sense of what is happening in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia.

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Reconciliation and Conflict Transformation

The conventional wisdom is that reconciliation can only begin once a peace agreement has ended the conflict (at least temporarily). However, if one adopts the perspective of conflict transformation, rather than conflict resolution, then reconciliation becomes a crucial part and parcel of conflict transformation. Along that line of thinking, this essay aims to examine how reconciliation can fit into the framework of conflict transformation.

Case Study

Response to Catherine MacKinnon's Article Turning Rape into Pornography: A Postmodern Genocide

Though Catherine MacKinnon has spearheaded the civil lawsuit against Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, for genocidal acts of rape and forms of torture and killings, this review analyzes the gaps in MacKinnon's works and theories on genocide and rape. The author of this review suggests the works of many other feminists of this issue to help fill in the facts left out by MacKinnon.

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The Acholi Traditional Approach to Justice and the War in Northern Uganda

This essay discusses the impact of the Northern Ugandan war on civilians and examines whether the traditional Acholi approach to forgiveness and reconciliation is beneficial in that extreme situation and how it relates to Western approaches to justice.

Case Study

The Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Chilean truth commission held after Pinochet lost power was not as successful as many had hoped, yet it did have significant impacts at both the individual and national level. This case study examines what the truth commission did, and what the short- and longer-term impacts were for individuals and for Chile as a whole.

Case Study

The Darfur Peace Process: Understanding the Obstacles to Success

This article examines the history of efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the violent conflict in the Darfur region of the Sudan. The author points out ways in which attempts at peacemaking have been lacking, and makes suggestions for future endeavors.

Case Study

The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79

In this riveting book, the first definitive account of the Khmer Rouge revolution, a world renowned authority on Cambodia shows how an ideological preoccupation with racist and totalitarian policies led a group of intellectuals to impose genocide on their own country. This edition includes a new preface recounting the fatal disintegration of the Khmer Rouge army, the death of Pol Pot, the United Nations' foray into the struggle to bring his surviving accomplices to justice, and the damning new evidence they could face.

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The Prevention and Intervention of Genocide

Samuel Totten brings together in one comprehensive collection the research and findings in various fields, such as political science, sociology, history, and psychology, to enable specialists in genocide studies, peace studies, and conflict resolution to benefit from the insights of a diverse range of scholars and foster an understanding of how the various components of genocide studies connect.

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The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

"The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up by the Government of National Unity to help deal with what happened under apartheid. The conflict during this period resulted in violence and human rights abuses from all sides. No section of society escaped these abuses." -- from Website

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The Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) - Report

"The Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR -- the Portuguese acronym) -- was set up in 2001 and functioned from 2002 until its dissolution in December 2005. It was an independent, statutory authority led by seven East Timorese Commissioners and mandated by UNTAET Regulation 2001/10 to undertake truth seeking for the period 1974-1999, facilitate community reconciliation for less serious crimes, and report on its work and findings and make recommendations. Its 2,800 page report entitled 'Chega!' was presented to the President, Parliament and Government of Timor-Leste following its completion in October 2005." -- from Website

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Transitional Justice Database Project

"The Transitional Justice Data Base Project began at the University of Wisconsin in 2005, and is run by three political scientists: Leigh A. Payne, Tricia D. Olsen, and Andrew G. Reiter. The team has created a global data base of over 900 mechanisms (trials, truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, and lustration policies) used from 1970-2007." -- from Website

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia

"The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia investigated 'the root causes of the conflict, the impact of the conflict on women, children and the generality of the Liberian society; responsibility for the massive commission of Gross Human Rights Violations (GHRV), and violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), International Human Rights Law (IHRL) as well as Egregious Domestic Law Violations (EDLV).'" -- from Website

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Truth Commissions

Truths commissions are official groups endowed with the authority to extensively investigate the human rights abuses and war crimes committed in a specific country or region during a specified time period.

Beyond Intractability Essay

UN Debate on Genocide Asks: Protect or Intervene?

"Out of genocides past and Africa's tumult a controversial but seldom-used diplomatic tool is emerging: The concept that the world has a "responsibility to protect" civilians against their own brutal governments. At the U.N. General Assembly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pushed Tuesday for more intervention for the sake of protection." -- from Website

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Violations of Human Rights: Health Practitioners as Witnesses

"With examples from the HIV/ AIDS epidemic in the USA, the Rwandan genocide, and physician -led political activism in Nepal, we describe three cases in which health practitioners bearing witness to humanitarian and human-rights issues have had imperfect outcomes. However these acts of bearing witness have been central to the promotion of humanitarianism and human rights, to the pursuit of justice that they have inevitably and implicitly endorsed, and thus to the politics that have or might yet address these issues." -- from Website

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