McEvoy and McGregor's edited collection is part of a growing current within transitional justice that seeks to move beyond the constraints of a scholarship dominated by lawyers and legalism. At issue are both the academics of normative inquiry and the real-life consequences of transitional justice that is imposed or acculturated “from above” and fails to translate into meaningful change for ordinary people “below.” The collection is both timely and refreshing. Timely because despite the fully recognized need to avoid “one-size-fits-all” policies (see United Nations Secretary-General 2004), the international community has only begun to experiment or engage with such things as hybrid institutions, complementarity, and traditional justice—and not necessarily that successfully. The book is refreshing because it leaves aside well-worn debates about truth, impunity, the rule of law, and restorative justice to tackle transitional justice from novel or underexplored perspectives within criminology, political economy, international development, and sociolegal studies.
“Above” and “below” are the operative linchpins throughout the collection. The principal criticism of top-down transitional justice is that it produces a thin, simplifying discourse that is easily transferred or appropriated. It treats post-conflict states as largely interchangeable as seen, for example, in the prolific transfer of “strikingly similar” truth commissions across Latin America that were not well-suited to specific contexts (Cavallaro & Albuja, p. 127). Technocratic benchmarks obfuscate “wider geo-political and economic interests” in the paths of transition (Lundy & McGovern, p. 104; see also Stanley). Formal institutional changes may be culturally adrift if insufficiently internalized by substate actors (Piacentini). International lawyers and policy makers fail to “see” the complex needs of reconstruction “beyond the state” (McEvoy, pp. 25, 38), and they treat countries as an “undifferentiated whole” (Arriaza & Roht-Arriaza, p. 144). State centrism risks treating victims as “passive subjects” rather than active agents involved in the (re)constitution of society (McConnachie & Morison, p. 84). This is compounded by an unfounded and oversold faith in the ability of legal institutions to produce truth, justice, or reconciliation (McEvoy, p. 30). Conversely, it also means that states themselves can appropriate the transitional justice lexicon within extremely narrow frameworks of change (Diaz, pp. 194–5).
Bottom-up transitional justice, by contrast, is heterogeneous and participatory, and comprises specific goals such as local truth-recovery, victim and ex-combatant support, or community reconciliation. It might come about as a kind of grassroots resistance, as in Colombia, where civil society groups have contested the official discourse of transition (Diaz). It might emerge spontaneously as a result of sheer neglect, as has occurred in Northern Ireland (Lundy & McGovern) and Guatemala (Arriaza & Roht-Arriaza). Or it might result from state and international efforts to engage communities in transitional justice, as with Timor-Leste's truth commission (Stanley). Of course, grassroots justice is not without its “warts” (McEvoy & McGregor, p. 9). The use of “insider” voices can be exclusive and hierarchical, leading to partial accounts, self-censorship, and the perpetuation of structural inequalities (Lundy & McGovern, p. 118; see also Stanley, McGregor). Informal processes are also more difficult to hold publicly accountable (McGregor, p. 63). But if international agencies or states are managing participatory justice, they may bypass grassroots organizations and co-opt “professionalized” nongovernmental organizations (Lundy & McGovern, p. 111). Indeed, it may be that local-level initiatives work best without formalization or “programming” because they are “so place- and time-specific that they cannot be duplicated” (Arriaza & Roht-Arriaza, p. 165).
However, it is important to note that the book also explores the possibilities of a “tiered” (McGregor) relationship between international, national, and local levels of transitional justice. No one is arguing that international law and norms are not important; at issue is how they can engage productively in local contexts by opening or recognizing the spaces needed for grassroots change. Interrogating the parameters of transitional justice, a theme that runs throughout the book, is pivotal in this respect. A “thicker” understanding of transitional justice will open the door to greater complexity and create space for “actors other than the state or ‘state-like’ institutions” (McEvoy, p. 44). This raises a basic question about transitional justice as a field of practice and normative inquiry. The overwhelming emphasis on gross violations of civil and political rights means that global inequalities, social injustice, and economic crimes fall outside mainstream considerations. “Truth” is circumscribed, international and domestic bystanders are unaccountable, and the sorts of social inequalities—gendered, ethnic, political, economic—that underlie conflict are weakly remedied. Transitional Justice From Below rightly criticizes the field as being too narrow. But if transitional justice reaches out more fully to rectify social inequality and structural violence, what makes it “transitional” rather than simply “justice”? The question is not simply semantic. Governments deploy the current toolkit and language of transitional justice even as they “other” victims, minimize their own involvement, and consolidate unequal power relations (Stanley, Diaz, Lundy & McGovern, McGregor, McEvoy, Cavallaro & Albuja). This rich collection of essays pushes for more justice even as it declines to comment on the limits of transitional justice as a distinctive undertaking.
