The Critique of Transitional Justice

Abstract

Abstract This chapter looks into the critique of transitional justice. It explains that historical sensitivity to genealogies of indigenous critique and their afterlives is relevant for developing a better understanding of the political present. Even though Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson expressed the ethos of liberal internationalism that informed the rise of transitional justice in the late twentieth century, the ethos also heralded its decline in the twenty-first century. The chapter considers the meaning and efficacy of the modalities of transitional justice which now range from archives to truth commissions. It also elaborates on the dangers of ideology masked as eschatology.