Chapter 6 argues that inquiries, whether traditional public inquiries, to more innovative and participatory forms of truth and reconciliation commissions, can enable episodic uses of power from victim-survivors and advocates, evidenced in the nature and extent of consultation and ownership of the process and the opportunity to engage with and influence the inquiry’s operations. Inquiries may shape the nature and function of the articulated emotions of victim-survivors but also have a significant emotional and potentially retraumatising effect for victim-survivors. The chapter argues that these episodic uses of power and experiences of emotional disclosure in well-designed inquiries or commissions will necessarily raise the expectations of victim-survivors for other elements of justice, including structural justice, to be addressed through and beyond other mechanisms of transitional justice.

This chapter discusses the place of conflict in transitional justice. Building on a range of historical real-life examples, it argues that conflict is an important rather than incidental part of many, if not all, transitional justice processes. The chapter initially focuses on value conflicts and then turns to conflicts of interests (political power, offices, money, etc.). Drawing on recent realist work in political theory, the chapter argues that it is time to give politics its due and idealisation a rest in transitional justice. This is not an argument against ideals, but against an approach that is idealistic in the wrong sense, in such a way as to suppress, erase from view, real experiences of conflict. Towards the end, the chapter explores recent attempts in the transitional justice literature to take conflict more seriously, particularly Christine Bell’s account of transitional justice as bargaining.

Chapter 9 focuses on transitional justice, the challenge of tackling past human rights violations, in contemporary Latin America. It shows that the record of Latin American countries varies considerably, but that, in the aggregate, the record of Latin America is largely a success story. The frequency with which past human rights violations have been addressed, and the steps taken through truth commissions and human rights trials, puts Latin America at the center of the global transitional justice movement. It also demonstrates, through a comparative analysis of six countries (Brazil and Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, Chile and Argentina), that several factors determine the response to past human rights violations. Democracies that are strong and channel citizen preferences succeed in confronting the challenge of transitional justice. Additionally, a strong record of transitional justice is associated with strong civil society organizations, generational change and new legal thinking about human rights law in the judiciary, and progressive developments in international law.

National and international lawyers are ubiquitous in transitional political negotiations. However, their role in advancing or stalling negotiations, or in advocating or resisting progressive change, is generally carried out behind closed doors. This chapter explores when and how lawyers living and working within repressive, conflicted, and transitional states influence the content of transitional political agreements. It draws on twenty-five interviews with lawyers who participated directly in negotiations and other informed commentators in our case study sites. Combining this empirical data with literature on lawyers as negotiators, the sociology of the legal profession, and critical international legal theory, the chapter explores the factors that shape relationships between lawyers and the political leadership in negotiations. The chapter further critically analyses the extent to which lawyers’ negotiating styles and legal skills can advance or inhibit the reaching of an agreement. The final section explores the discretion and capacity of lawyer-negotiators for legal imagination in crafting transitional futures. We find that lawyer-negotiations often have to grapple with reconciling their role as legal technicians with the ethical and political challenges of advising on law’s content at times when the law itself is indeterminate or subject to negotiation.

This chapter reflects on the implications of resilience thinking for transitional justice as a transformative process that contributes to adaptive peacebuilding. It discusses how the concept creates space for new thinking about transitional justice and the potential dangers and opportunities afforded by a resilience approach. As part of this analysis, the chapter provides a critical appraisal of the overall approach to transitional justice that has dominated the field, considering transformative justice as an alternative perspective that challenges the hegemonic politico-legal, state-based, backward-looking retributive framework. It argues that resilience thinking supports a greater focus on psychosocial, community-based, forward-looking restorative approaches to transitional justice, consistent with the transformative turn in the field. It demonstrates this by exploring different understandings of justice, how they are pursued in the context of transitional justice and what they mean for building resilient societies after mass violence and human rights violations. The chapter further examines how various transitional justice mechanisms might contribute to individual, community and systemic societal resilience, while also recognising their limitations.

Chapter 6 illustrates how ‘truth-seeking’ bodies, the TCs in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Timor-Leste, selected and reconstructed the facts of resource-driven wars, particularly their underlying causes and dynamics, as well as the responsibility for harms caused by extractive activities. The chapter also shows how different legal regimes were mobilised in support of the ‘truth’ produced by the three institutions, by identifying three paradigms of responsibility: the state-centered perspective of the Sierra Leonean TC, with its focus on local mismanagement and the need to reform resource governance; the economic crimes lens of the Liberian TC, which sought to hold business actors/public officials accountable for resource plunder and related atrocities through prosecution and vetting; and the socio-economic rights approach of the Timor-Leste TC, resulting in the recognition of breaches to the collective rights of the Timorese people to self-determination and recommendation of ecological restoration. Each paradigm captures and misses something about these conflicts and is associated with different reactions by relevant stakeholders to the findings/recommendations of the three TCs.

The term conflict management stands for a wide array of activities undertaken to prevent violent conflicts, to manage and end them once broken out, as well as to build peace and to avoid a recurrence of violence. Such activities include mediation between warring factions, military and civilian peacekeeping operations to oversee truces or peace agreements, peace enforcement, and post-conflict reconstruction, which comprises initiatives for state-building and socio-economic development amongst others. This chapter scrutinizes these activities and identifies factors that lead to peace. Itconcentrates on mediation and power-sharing as means to make peace, on military and civilian operations of international organizations as means to keep peace, as well as on the accommodation of spoilers, the design of peace operations, and transitional justice as means to build peace.

Reconciliation requires individuals and groups to address past and present inequality, injustice, and violence to construct better futures based on stronger social bonds and a respect for human rights. Yet, the theoretical threads connecting the concepts are rarely unraveled. This chapter uses psychological frameworks to better understand reconciliation in relation to human rights. The authors propose that in postconflict settings, reconciliation and human rights are interdependent and mutually reinforcing, and neither is truly possible without the other. First, the authors briefly review understandings of reconciliation and how they are advanced by postconflict mechanisms such as truth commissions. Second, the authors explain how reconciliation may be connected to greater respect for human rights. Third, Colombia is used as a case study to demonstrate the complex relationships between forgiveness, reconciliation, and human rights. Finally, the chapter offers future directions for research at the intersection of human rights, psychology, and reconciliation.

Sierra Leone was the first country to simultaneously deploy what are traditionally thought of as alternative post-conflict justice mechanisms: a special tribunal to prosecute crimes, and a truth and reconciliation commission to promote national healing and reconciliation. This chapter assesses the important Special Court jurisprudence on this topic and its implications for other post-conflict situations in Africa and around the world. In the first part, the chapter compares the similarities, and differences, in the mandates of the two institutions. The author then discusses how the TRC began its operations in 2002 at the same time as the Special Court was carrying out its investigations and issuing indictments against suspects accused of committing international crimes within the tribunal’s jurisdiction. Second, the chapter addresses the question of hierarchy and primacy between the two institutions: with the TRC being a domestic program and the Special Court maintaining an international authority. Finally, the chapter addresses the attempted testimony of a key SCSL defendant, or rather lack thereof, at the TRC and the tussle between the two bodies regarding protection of the fair trial rights of the suspects and the implications for future similar situations.

There is an assumption that truth commissions have not taken on corporations for their complicity in past human rights abuses. The aim of this chapter is to expose the truths about corporate complicity hidden in truth commissions’ reports. It analyzes truth commissions’ potential as a non-judicial transitional justice corporate accountability mechanism. It considers models that truth-gathering instruments might incorporate in future efforts at corporate accountability.

The chapter begins with an analysis of truth commissions’ efforts to unveil the story of corporate complicity in past violence. It challenges the notion that economic actors were peripheral to, or unwilling partners in, authoritarian state and armed conflict human rights abuses. Itmagnifies the details of these truths that have been overlooked. It then attempt to explain how the truth about corporate complicity made it into these reports, drawing on our Archimedes’ Lever analogy. In the conclusion, it explores strategies to promote corporate accountability through new truth-gathering processes.