Workshop Historicising Transitional Justice: Past, Present and Future

Thursday 22 June 2023
at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague

How can societies achieve lasting peace in the wake of civil war? The United Nations advocate transitional justice, which aims to address wartime grievances and promote reconciliation through strategies such as prosecution, reparations, amnesty, lustration, truth and reconciliation commissions, and communal commemoration. Because transitional justice scholarship mostly focuses on recent conflicts, however, it remains difficult to the evaluate the long-term effectiveness of such measures. This is precisely why we need a long-term perspective. To do so, this interdisciplinary workshop brings together specialists and practitioners in the fields of transitional justice, peace and security studies, and history. 

Our aim is to compare transitional justice strategies past and present, and to discuss the potential of historicising transitional justice. How can current-day practices help us understand the failures and success of the past? And what lessons, if any, can we draw form past strategies, in order to develop more robust transitional justice mechanisms in the future?

Organizers: David van der Linden, Rosanne Baars, Sherilyn Bouyer (University of Groningen)

Further information: www.histj.com/workshop