Transitional Justice and Its Discontents

摘要: The political-transition paradigm has been widely debated in the pages of Journal Democracy and elsewhere, but its idealistic younger sibling, transitional-justice paradigm, rarely scrutinized so critically. This article argues that as International Criminal Court runs out steam, heyday transitional justice—with clamor for more international tribunals truth commissions—has passed. Whatever lawyers want us to believe, laws are made by people, law cannot be morally superior politics. In aftermath mass violence, we need a combination serious historical research pragmatic political solutions, not therapeutic legalism.