The study of transitional justice is now firmly established in a large scholarly and policy literature. However, while much attention has been paid to emblematic country cases such as Argentina, or the extraordinary development of international criminal tribunals, other experiments with transitional justice have received less attention.
Perhaps more than most, Peru merits careful consideration for what it can tell us about both the scholarship and practice of transitional justice. This is the task Rebecca K. Root sets out to achieve in her compelling and richly detailed account of transitional justice in Peru. As Root describes it, Peru's decade of transitional justice, commencing with the fall of the Fujimori regime in 2000, has been exhilarating and its victories bold. The striking achievements of transitional justice advocates within Peru are readily apparent, culminating in the successful prosecution by Peruvian courts of Alberto Fujimori in 2009. In so doing, Peru became the first country to convict a democratically elected head of state for human rights crimes.
It is clear that Peru has gone further and faster than most countries in advancing a transitional justice agenda, evident in a series of legal, institutional and symbolic innovations including the establishment of a highly regarded Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is no surprise, then, that Peru emerges in recent scholarship (Hayner and Olsen, Payne and Reiter) as a transitional justice success story. However, as Root notes, the country's ‘victories [are] so bold that they threaten to overshadow other parts of Peru's story’ (p. 9).
And this matters. This book is also a considered corrective to scholarship which would conflate success according to objective measures and correlatives with more meaningful appreciation for the social and political impact of transitional justice efforts. Empirically, the book suggests that more fine-grained detail will be required if we are to get closer to understanding the full effects of transitional justice. For instance, in evaluating the effects of human rights trials, salient questions include: what kind of trial? For what types of crimes? Against which class of actors? And with what outcome? The importance of the symbolic victory of Fujimori's conviction cannot be denied; nevertheless, it should not be allowed to obscure a gathering ‘stealth immunity’ and a deceleration of transitional justice efforts.
The figures are sobering. For instance, of 194 cases related to the political violence of 1980–2000 in process in Peruvian courts by 2008, only six have ended in conviction. Thousands of burial sites remain unexplored and implementation of individual reparations proceeds at a glacial pace. Root does a good job of breaking down the complexity behind growing paralysis on human rights accountability in Peru, focusing principally on military resistance, shifting political opportunity structures, and the logistics of the courts and state bureaucracy.
Central to the narrative are the unusual circumstances of Peruvian redemocratisation in 2001, which opened up a fleeting opportunity to set in motion an ambitious transitional justice agenda. However, by 2003 momentum was already slowing, and by 2006 the window was firmly shut by the government of Alan García – implicated in human rights violations during his first presidency (1985–1990).
Root also focuses on the politics of violence and victimhood at the local level, yielding significant insight. Drawing extensively on key anthropological scholars (including Degregori, Laplante and Theidon) who will be familiar to Peruvian specialists but less so to the general reader, Root illuminates how the nature of political violence in Peru, perpetrated by both state agents and guerrilla organisations, has had a profound impact. Powerful forces opposed to human rights accountability in the political class, military and media have effectively harnessed the toxic label of ‘terrorism’ to undermine progress on establishing a consensus on justice and especially reconciliation among key political actors, let alone Peruvian society at large.
What emerges from Root's analysis is a profound inability on the part of transitional justice advocates to ground early victories in a political narrative and programme of action capable of decisively shifting the attitude of Peru's elite and public. The TRC and the custodians of its legacy have faced various challenges in their efforts to shift popular attitudes on the need for transformative social change, particularly with regard to addressing the latent drivers of conflict: racism, inequality and poverty. Although they may have displayed tactical errors, Root possibly underplays the extent to which the integrity of custodians has been undermined by political interference. The Constitutional Tribunal, following landmark human rights rulings, was effectively brought to heel in 2008 with the departure of the jurist César Landa. Similarly, congressional intransigence has left the ombudsman under interim leadership for long periods of time.
The Peruvian transitional justice experiment might be only a decade young, but the omens are not good. As elsewhere in the region, such as in Uruguay, amnesty laws are on the political agenda in Peru and in the event of a Keiko Fujimori presidential victory in 2016, a pardon for her father is more or less assured. Understandably, Root struggles at times to reconcile the duelling narratives of ‘bold victories’ versus the ‘limitation of transitional justice’. The claim that the Fujimori conviction gives hope that the justice cascade in Peru will strengthen (p. 124) jars with the conclusion a few pages later that this cascade ‘might well be reduced to a stream again’.
The theoretical pay-off of this book is related to the broader literature on human rights and in particular constructivist scholarship on transnational human rights advocacy. Root convincingly situates the Peruvian experience within the theory frames offered by Sikkink and colleagues, including the ‘boomerang effect’ and the five-step ‘spiral model’, developed to explain the effect of international human rights norms at the local level from repression to eventual norm internalisation. The theoretical framing of the case is generally well done, and this focus ensures that the appeal of the book extends to a broader human rights scholarly and practitioner audience.
If I have one reservation, it is that Root fails to explore the limitations of these theoretical frames, in particular their thin analytical purchase on questions of domestic norm internalisation. The Peruvian case valuably demonstrates the limits of transnational and domestic advocacy coalitions to effect societal change, and the danger of backsliding. The implicit assumption of sequential progress towards internalisation or ‘lock-in’ of norms is not unproblematic. In turn, the concept of internalisation is not entirely adequate, implying as it does an enduring stability and agreement around the norm in question. Root's uncritical usage of this terminology and constructivist theories which offer limited insight into a realm of domestic political power struggles, mobilisation and social influence is a missed opportunity.
Notwithstanding, this book constitutes a valuable addition to our knowledge on transitional justice, inspiring a host of important questions into the legacy effects of transitional justice efforts – most consequentially of all perhaps, in Root's own words, ‘has transitional justice changed anyone's mind?’
