Are truth and other epistemic values such as accuracy, consistency, broad scope, simplicity and fruitfulness the most important values? This is a position that can be defended as long as one focusses on the outcomes of the scientific endeavour – mainly theories and models. If one also takes into account the social process that yields these outcomes, then a series of other values become not only important, but really constitutive of science: if one is not free to engage in scientific activity, for example, then there are no outcomes in the first place to be appraised invoking epistemic values. It seems that non-epistemic values such as freedom, honesty and integrity are also constitutive of the collective scientific endeavour. Do we possess an external criterion guaranteeing the priority of a single value or a set of values vis-à-vis the rest?

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.

In Chapter 9, I focus on the pluralist elements of international society and isolate the pluralist logic of international action in relation to environmental issues and values, what I have referred to as Green Westphalia. In a first step, I explore the pluralist logic of coexistence and the extent to which it can give rise of sustained international environmental cooperation. I then move on to consider whether the emergence of the environment as a security threat (e.g. climate change) could translate into a distinctly pluralist response to global environmental problems. In the final section of this chapter, I take this argument one step further and explore whether environmental securitisation could engage great power management, a classic pluralist institution in international society, as the source for international environmental action and leadership.