Patterns of Injustice

Abstract

Abstract This chapter presents the concept transitional injustice to address some of the important variation in the intentions and aims of governments which choose to adopt transitional justice policies, processes, and institutions. In particular, it raises the issue that many of the normatively “good” outcomes associated with transitional justice (such as the promotion of democracy, human rights, and an end to violence) are not the intended aims of the implementing government. It argues that rather than intending to promote these goals, governments may instead use these same institutional forms and behaviors to strengthen authoritarianism, increase state repression, and foment armed conflict and violence. Despite the importance of the topic, it is clear that it can be extremely challenging to identify and measure the intentions of governments in the creation of new institutions. The chapter outlines the ways in which existing data efforts account and fail to account for potential injustice in their coding protocols and the implication that this omission can have for some of our conclusions about the impact of transitional justice. It then turns to new data on truth commissions to assess the implications of alternative sampling strategies for our understanding of patterns of transitional injustice more broadly.