Transitional Justice (TJ) focuses on the processes of dealing with the legacy of large-scale past abuses (in the aftermath of traumatic experiences such as war or authoritarianism) with the aim of fostering domestic justice and creating the basis for a sustainable peace. TJ however also entails the problem of how a torn society may be able to become a self-determining member of a just international order. This paper presents a minimal conception of TJ, which departs from Rawls' conception of normative stability of the international order, which suggests disentangling the two goals of fostering democracy within torn societies and TJ itself. The scope of TJ is therefore limited to enabling these societies to create minimal internal conditions for joining a just international order on equal footing. This paper makes an original contribution to two different debates, namely normative research on TJ, and post-Rawlsian literature in general. First, it provides a new direction for normative theorizing about TJ which takes both its domestic and international dimensions seriously into consideration. Second, it extends Rawls' political liberal outlook to an area where it is not usually understood to apply.

Debates about global distributive justice focus on the gulf between the wealthy North and the impoverished South, rather than on issues arising between liberal democracies. A review of John Rawls’s approach to international justice discloses a step Rawls skipped in his extension of his original-position procedure. The skipped step is where a need for the distributional autonomy of sovereign liberal states reveals itself. Neoliberalism denies the possibility and the desirability of distributional autonomy. A complete Rawlsian account of global justice shows the necessity and possibility of a charter between liberal states, assuring each a proper minimum degree of distributional autonomy

Scholars and policymakers in the West commonly hold that liberal countries that intervene to stop genocide subsequently ought to establish democratic political institutions to enable peaceful collective self-determination. I argue that this guidance is problematic. First, introducing electoral democracy in deeply ethnically divided societies – especially but not only after genocide – often results in either tyrannical majority rule or deadlocked decision making rather than inclusive self-determination. Second, normatively speaking, John Rawls made a strong case that inclusive self-determination can be achieved through ‘decent,’ less than democratic political structures that enable group-based representation. Bringing these insights together, I argue that particularly for postgenocidal societies that lack prior experience with liberal democratic rule, outside interveners should stop short of actively promoting full electoral democracy and instead consider promoting hybrid political institutions that combine popularly elected bodies with customary authority structures. Such hybrid institutions can prevent tyrannical majority rule as well as decision-making deadlock. They are also likely to fit better with local culture. Therefore, they may offer a more robust foundation for peaceful self-determination. A discussion of hybrid institutions in postwar Somaliland and Bougainville illustrates how these arrangements can facilitate peaceful self-determination in practice.

How should liberal societies respond to nonliberal ones? In this paper I examine John Rawls's conception of international toleration against what is sometimes called a cosmopolitan one. Rawls holds that a just international order should recognize certain nonliberal societies, to which he refers as decent peoples, as equal members in good standing in a just society of peoples. It would be a violation of liberalism's own principle of toleration to deny the international legitimacy of decent peoples who, among other things, affirm human rights and accept peaceful coexistence with other societies. According to the cosmopolitan idea of international toleration, on the contrary, only societies that are liberal in character meet the criteria for toleration. I suggest that, against the Rawlsian conception of international toleration, the cosmopolitan idea is more consistent with the fundamentals of liberal political morality. I then clarify the ways in which cosmopolitan toleration is not worryingly interventionist even as it is not altogether toothless; and I end with some reflections on why cosmopolitism is not morally imperialistic.