This chapter offers a pluralist reading of transitional justice built around three meanings of pluralism. The first is value pluralism – the idea, dear to Isaiah Berlin, that values are irreducibly manifold, potential conflicting and frequently incommensurable in such a way that they cannot be ranked or weighed on any single scale. The second meaning of pluralism is cultural pluralism. It refers to the fact that there are many different cultures, many different collective ways of life, none of which can claim superiority. While insisting on the possibility of a cross-cultural conversation around core values, the proposed pluralist approach rejects the normal model’s tendency to reduce transitional justice to one set of (Western) cultural forms. The third form of pluralism briefly considered is legal pluralism, meaning the coexistence of competing legal orders. Discussing Rwanda’s experience with the so-called gacaca courts, the chapter suggests a pluralist understanding of the rule of law flexible enough to accommodate cultural variation while remaining committed to what I take to be its universal core. The chapter ends by proposing a pluralist method for thinking about transitional justice, which is linked to basic commitments referred to as sense of reality, anti-monism, situated thinking, decolonised cosmopolitanism and fallibilistic mentality. The chapter argues that these commitments can help mitigate a number of problematic trends in contemporary transitional justice discourse and practice.

This chapter analyzes how political prisoners in 1980s Poland sought to put their plight on the agenda of East–West relations. In so doing, this chapter reconstructs a central symbol of 1980s global human rights culture: the prisoner of conscience. The prisoner of conscience, the chapter shows, was the result of how Amnesty International had reimagined the struggle against political incarceration. In the past, this struggle had been driven by solidarity with political prisoners' specific ideology; Amnesty's activism, in contrast, centered on empathy with the plight of suffering individuals who tried to defend their very humanity against an all-powerful state. By drawing on this discourse and the social practices associated with it, especially hunger strikes, the Polish prisoners managed to turn themselves into icons of human rights culture, quasi-sacred images of the international community's most hallowed values. Yet this process also divorced the prisoners from the specific political aims they were struggling for, allowing powerful international actors to project their own views onto them. For all its antipolitical imagery, the chapter shows, the “prisoner of conscience” was part of a symbolic politics of human rights.