Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice

Edited by Jens Meierhenrich, Alexander Laban Hinton, and Lawrence Douglas.

The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice is an authoritative guide to the rapidly growing domain of transitional justice—the practices and processes of reckoning pursued in the aftermath of historic injustice. Since the neologism’s coining in the late 1990s, “transitional justice” has become one of the 21st century’s most influential practices of international humanitarianism. Unfortunately, transitional justice projects often conceal the very violence they inflict. Across nearly 48 genre-bending chapters, this Handbook explores, articulates, and advances a multifaceted critique of transitional justice. Ranging across space and time, it interrogates the nature and legacies of the “justice cascade” that the prosecution of international crimes is said to have inspired. An interdisciplinary cast of leading scholars questions the meaning and efficacy of transitional justice’s modalities, which range from archives to courts and from memorials to reparations. In so doing, this volume’s authors critically challenge the Panglossian orthodoxies that have accumulated and ossified around efforts to come to terms with violent pasts, from colonialism to genocide. This global endeavor is not one of tear-down, however. Rather, it points toward a reimagined project that is more clear-eyed about the promises of transitional justice, and its inherent limits. A definitive work on the subject, this Handbook is essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners interested in transitional justice.

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Jens Meierhenrich is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He previously taught for a decade at Harvard University.

Alexander Laban Hinton is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention.

Lawrence Douglas is a legal scholar in the department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he holds the James J. Grosfield Professorship.