This book is a welcome contribution to a small but growing body of evidence-based literature addressing how ‘transitional justice’ mechanisms such as war crimes courts and truth and reconciliation commissions are actually experienced on the ground in African contexts. This collection of essays, largely ethnographic in approach, aims to transcend the myopic focus on formal institutions that usually characterises the debate on transitional justice and offers a more grounded understanding of how societies, in the aftermath of war or authoritarianism, aim to realise ‘more justice’ (p. 1). Thus, refreshingly, many of the essays focus on sets of processes, embedded in broader issues of transition and justice, whether it be land restitution in South Africa, refugee repatriation in Mauritania, or ‘civic education camps’ in post-genocide Rwanda. These are the under-studied sites, argue the authors, where ‘former combatants and their leaders, politicians, civil society activists, village elders and ordinary people advance their views on how to realise justice or seek to secure a new place in the political system’ (p. 1). What, if any, connection these processes have to the meta-narratives and normative ideals of transitional justice as pursued by courts, truth commissions and liberal human rights narratives remains in question throughout the volume.

In exploring such complex dynamics, the co-editors point to two ‘inter-related dialectics’ that feature in all the chapters. The first is the discrepancy between the ‘lofty promises of justice’ as espoused by lawyers and politicians and the ‘messy realities’ on the ground. This is by no means a revelatory insight but the volume adds fascinating empirical depth to this widely accepted dissonance. Steven Robin's discussion of the social activism around unenclosed toilets in informal settlements in South Africa and its connections to the legacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is particularly thought-provoking. What the ‘spectacle’ of the open toilet came to represent, he argues, was ‘the indignities and injustices of daily life under apartheid, as well as the limits of transformation under apartheid’ (p. 85). The second dialectic is perhaps more theoretically engaging. This concerns the ‘logics of exception on the one hand, and the ordinary or normal, on the other hand’ (p. 13). Throughout the volume, we are reminded of how transitional justice mechanisms and narratives are often deployed in response to a perceived ‘emergency’ or framed as ‘exceptional measures’, where in fact the conflict or oppression to which they respond was the result of long-running structural inequalities which may well require responses based on the complex logics of ‘ordinary’ life.

In exploring this second dialectic, three implicit questions arise. The first is: who is transitional justice for? Nigel Eltringham's chapter on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and Sabine Höhn's chapter on the International Criminal Court's intervention in Kenya both argue that the courts’ ultimate goal and outcome was to contribute to international criminal justice per se, in terms of both jurisprudence and kudos, rather than to address the structural inequalities and violence that caused the situations in the first place. The second question is: what can the concept of ‘exception’ really contribute to the debate on ‘new beginnings’ in Africa? The term itself is not really theorised in any of the chapters, although Olaf Zenker does acknowledge the ‘massive scope of social scientific engagements' with Giorgio Agamben's state of exception and convincingly argues that it ‘offers too much and too little’ (p. 115). One of the central contributions of this volume is the empirical depiction of popular political and social resistance to the ‘exception’ narrative as formulated by international courts, truth and reconciliation bodies and human rights organisations. Whether it be the social protest movements in South Africa, which have mobilised people around the issue of sanitation and allowed them to critique the legacy of the TRC, or the rejection of UNHCR-inspired accounts of past injustices among certain sections of the Mauritanian refugee population in Senegal, as described by Marion Fresia, we see ordinary people asserting their collective agency and constructing alternative narratives about transition priorities. The final question is this: how might we conceptualise the relationship between law and justice in the context of ‘negotiating new beginnings’ in Africa? Kimberly Armstrong in her chapter on northern Uganda draws upon Jacques Derrida's argument that ‘law can never completely arrive at justice’, and at the end of the volume the reader is left with a detailed picture of the messy practical and everyday realities that support this insight. In sum, this volume makes a substantial empirical contribution to our understanding of justice and transition in sub-Saharan Africa and raises important questions worthy of further interrogation and research.