How should a society in transition reckon with past acts of violence, repression, and civil conflict? In her extremely illuminating book on transitional justice, Bronwyn Leebaw frames her response to this question by contrast to two popular positions: “human rights legalism,” which sees transitional justice as best promoted through criminal prosecutions, on the model of the Nuremburg Trials, and “therapeutic restorative justice,” which views transitional justice as a healing process, exemplified by South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Against these two views, Leebaw argues that transitional justice ought to be conceived as a process of political judgment. Political judgment requires a society to examine the past from multiple perspectives and to generate new common standards through critical reflection and democratic persuasion. Once we understand transitional justice in this way, she claims, we will emphasize some unfamiliar aspects of it, including the systemic character of complicity with the previous regime, the need for economic and social reforms to redress past wrongs, and acts of exemplary past resistance as a basis for future reconciliation. Leebaw's important book is empirically grounded in several case studies, it is well written and researched, and I recommend it highly.

Human rights legalism claims that criminal trials are the proper forum for judging the past. Leebaw offers two reasons for rejecting this approach. First, she suggests that since it focuses on high-level prosecutions, it provides an inadequate arena for working through wider social processes of complicity. Many ordinary people were not planners of state repression, but they still benefited from unjust prior regimes, and their complicity needs to be addressed. Merely prosecuting high-level planners may encourage these more “everyday offenders” to feel that their hands are clean. The author's second reason for rejecting human rights legalism is that it encourages a conformist outlook. Developing an argument drawn from Judith Shklar, she claims that the criminal law approach ultimately sees justice as a matter of impartial rule following, and thus avoids criticizing the morality of existing legal systems.

Leebaw is surely correct in her worry that criminal trials by themselves are insufficient to address the problem of widespread complicity. But this does not show that criminal trials are not important. After all, there are very good reasons for prosecuting the elite planners of state wrongs: They really were more responsible for these wrongs than most other people. What she does show is that criminal trials need to be supplemented with nonjudicial mechanisms—like truth commissions and educative processes—that address complicity and attempt to change the political culture. I was unconvinced, however, by Leebaw's worry that international criminal law encourages a conformist outlook. Surely one can believe that international criminal law is valuable because it combats impunity among state officials and fosters transparency, without thinking that all laws—even illegitimate ones—must be obeyed. As she highlights, the Nuremberg Principles rejected a criminal defense based on superior orders, which indicates that this approach is not wedded to unqualified obedience to the state. The upshot, then, is that while Leebaw has convinced me that human rights legalism must be implemented with sensitivity to local context and supplemented by nonjudicial processes, I do not think she has shown that criminal trials are the wrong response.

After criticizing trials, Leebaw examines the “restorative justice” approach, associated with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). She argues convincingly that the TRC was drawn to interpret restorative justice in ways that compromised its value. By focusing on personal trauma narratives and on therapeutic healing, the TRC misleadingly fostered the view that all South Africans were equally united in victimhood. This avoided a clear judgment of the injustice of the apartheid past and obscured the importance of social and economic reform as methods for promoting reconciliation. But despite the failures of restorative justice in the South African context, the author believes that an alternative interpretation of it holds considerable promise.

Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Leebaw holds that an alternative vision of restorative justice should focus on establishing a basis for political judgment of the past in communities riven by deep division about proper standards. She claims that this political judgment must be based on an “enlarged mentality” in which one “thinks in the place of everyone else” (p. 98), by imagining a common problem from various perspectives in society. This requires an effort to establish a critical historical evaluation of the previous regime, and also to persuade one's fellow citizens to accept new common standards. Transitional justice processes strive to establish new community norms through a process of judgment in a context of deep division.

One claim that emerges from this reinterpretation is that transitional justice institutions should not depoliticize their work, as both the South African TRC and criminal tribunals have done, according to Leebaw. Depoliticization involves treating parties evenhandedly, even when one side is mired in systemic injustice. Depoliticization also involves an effort to hide or mask the political compromises that went into establishing transitional justice institutions and that limit their mandates, as for example the South African amnesty for political crimes. Leebaw argues instead that transitional justice institutions should strive to be overtly critical of the past, and to highlight their partial character.

While there is much to agree with in the author's argument, I was only partly persuaded that Arendtian political judgment is the right approach to transitional justice. On this model, political judgment requires ongoing contestation among plural perspectives and opinions, which is good for its own sake. “Political judgments,” Leebaw writes, “are not derived from an independent, objective standard of justice” (p. 175). Instead of invoking universal standards, we ought to examine the diverse perspectives that exist in our political community, while gradually persuading others to adopt a new basis for common ground. Unlike Leebaw, however, I cannot see how all of the perspectives that exist in the aftermath of a repressive regime are to be valued. Supporters of the apartheid state have a misguided perspective, not one we should seek to preserve. Of course, we should listen to everyone's views to see if there is some truth contained in them, but some views may ultimately need to be rejected. So how can we be sure that the right judgment of the political past will emerge out of consideration of these deeply opposed political viewpoints? Perhaps some viewpoints cannot be reconciled into a common political judgment because they are too unjust. In my view, a valid political judgment does in the end presuppose objective standards, and may not simply “bubble up” through a consideration of diverse views. Such objective standards tell us that apartheid was an unjust political system, even when many white South Africans disagree.

At times, Leebaw actually seems to employ a more objective account of political judgment than the one she explicitly endorses. She suggests, for example, that transitional justice institutions ought to highlight exemplary cases of resistance. Regardless of the multiple perspectives available, then, she thinks that one side was clearly right and the other wrong, and that our political judgments ought to reflect this important fact. With that—and with much else that Leebaw has to say in this fascinating book—I wholeheartedly agree.