Truth Commissions and Transitional Justice
How societies emerging from conflict or authoritarian rule use truth commissions, trials, and reparations to reckon with the past.
Reckoning After Atrocity
When a war ends or a dictatorship falls, the society that emerges must decide how to deal with the past. Do you prosecute perpetrators and risk destabilizing a fragile peace? Do you grant amnesty and risk victims feeling abandoned? Do you try to establish the truth and hope that acknowledgment is itself a form of justice? Transitional justice is the field that grapples with these questions.
The main tools of transitional justice are criminal prosecutions (domestic or international), truth commissions, reparations programs, institutional reform (vetting, lustration), and memorialization. Most post-conflict societies use some combination of these tools, because no single mechanism can address the full range of harms. Criminal trials punish a handful of the worst offenders but cannot process thousands of cases. Truth commissions can document patterns of abuse but do not deliver punishment. Reparations acknowledge victims but cannot undo what was done.
