"Analyzes how activists, legal strategies, and judicial receptivity to human rights claims are constructing new accountability outcomes for human rights violations in Chile and El Salvador"--Provided by publisher.

Through war crimes prosecutions, truth commissions, purges of perpetrators, reparations, and memorials, transitional justice practices work under the assumptions that truth telling leads to reconciliation, prosecutions bring closure, and justice prevents the recurrence of violence. But when local responses to transitional justice destabilize these assumptions, the result can be a troubling disconnection between international norms and survivors' priorities. Localizing Transitional Justice traces how ordinary people respond to—and sometimes transform—transitional justice mechanisms, laying a foundation for more locally responsive approaches to social reconstruction after mass violence and egregious human rights violations. Recasting understandings of culture and locality prevalent in international justice, this vital book explores the complex, unpredictable, and unequal encounter among international legal norms, transitional justice mechanisms, national agendas, and local priorities and practices.

Explores how the former communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe have grappled with the serious human rights violations of past regimes.

Latin America is still dealing with the legacy of terror and torture from its authoritarian past. In the years after the restoration of democratic governments in countries where violations of human rights were most rampant, the efforts to hold former government officials accountable were mainly conducted at the level of the state, through publicly appointed truth commissions and other such devices. This stage of “transitional justice” has been carefully and exhaustively studied. But as this first wave of efforts died down, with many still left unsatisfied that justice had been rendered, a new approach began to take over. In Post-transitional Justice, Cath Collins examines the distinctive nature of this approach, which combines evolving legal strategies by private actors with changes in domestic judicial systems. Collins presents both a theoretical framework and a finely detailed investigation of how this has played out in two countries, Chile and El Salvador. Drawing on more than three hundred interviews, Collins analyzes the reasons why the process achieved relative success in Chile but did not in El Salvador.

This major study examines the successes and failures of the full transitional justice programme in Sierra Leone. It sets out the implications of the Sierra Leonean experience for other post-conflict situations and for the broader project of evaluating transitional justice.

In the first project of its kind to compare multiple mechanisms and combinations of mechanisms across regions, countries, and time, Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Processes, Weighing Efficacy systematically analyzes the claims made in the literature using a vast array of data, which the authors have assembled in the Transitional Justice Data Base.

This book addresses current developments in transitional justice in Latin America – effectively the first region to undergo concentrated transitional justice experiences in modern times. Using a comparative approach, it examines trajectories in truth, justice, reparations, and amnesties in countries emerging from periods of massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law. The book examines the cases of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay, developing and applying a common analytical framework to provide a systematic, qualitative and comparative analysis of their transitional justice experiences. More specifically, the book investigates to what extent there has been a shift from impunity towards accountability for past human rights violations in Latin America. Using ‘thick’, but structured, narratives – which allow patterns to emerge, rather than being imposed – the book assesses how the quality, timing and sequencing of transitional justice mechanisms, along with the context in which they appear, have mattered for the nature and impact of transitional justice processes in the region. Offering a new approach to assessing transitional justice, and challenging many assumptions in the established literature, this book will be of enormous benefit to scholars and others working in this area.