This is a very timely and pertinent contribution to current debates addressing not only political and institutional developments around the idea(l) of justice in Latin America, but also accounting for the even more complex ‘negotiations and social interactions’ involved in the ‘production of justice’ (p. 2). Justice, this book emphasises, is much more than only the legal or institutional realm. The editors quote Amartya Sen asserting that ‘[j]ustice is ultimately connected to the way people's lives go, and not merely with the nature of the institutions surrounding them’ (ibid.). The compilation embodies a search for ‘senses of justice’ that are not limited to, nor fully encompassed by, the justice the law can provide (p. 5).

The book consists of an Introduction by the editors, and three parts. The first is entitled ‘Memory and Justice under Construction’ and focuses on ‘on the ground construction’ of ideas and practices on justice. It contains chapters on how debates on the rights of victims evolved in Colombia (by Juan Pablo Vera Lugo), and on the ways justice was sought in different ways by those affected by the bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Association (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, in 1994, by Karen Ann Faulk. The second part brings in space, and delves into the ways spatial markers influence definitions and contestations of what justice might entail. Graham Denyer Willis (Chapter 3) addresses how police perceptions of justice are informed by the specific precincts in which they work and by feelings of not being acknowledged – making, for instance, human rights values almost irrelevant in cases where the place of work is dangerous. Leticia Barrera, in Chapter 4, analyses how insiders and outsiders look at the ways the Argentine Supreme Court embodies justice. In Part 3, Sandra Brunnegger addresses how the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunals in Colombia investigated, through their hearings, the operations of transnational corporations in Chapter 5, and Marta Magalhães Wallace, in Chapter 6, reconstructs how focuses on citizen security hamper the articulation of demands for social justice, in Salvador, Brazil. In Chapter 7, Alonso Barros explores how in the Atacama desert in Chile legislation around water use creates reified notions of local cultures and how this leads to specific local defence repertoires. In the book's conclusion, inspired by indigenous Bolivian administration of justice, Mark Goodale attempts to synthesise the finding of the previous chapters.

The book is strong in two ways: firstly in demonstrating how perceptions and assessments of justice are different for specific constellations of actors, and in given socio-political arrangements and ethnic makeups; and secondly in showing how important it is to take these insights on board.

A less accomplished aspect of the book is the arbitrary farrago of ‘alternative’ conceptualisations of justice. The book takes us from Colombian victims of violence and the ways legal vocabularies modify and distort the interpretations and practices of this conceptualisation, through the analysis of the different emphases in demands for justice by various groups after the bombing of the AMIA building, through a portrait of the Brazilian police ‘as individuals in a weak system’ (p. 93) pursuing their safety and benefits rather than enforcing the law, to, in the conclusion, the vagueness of the whole notion of justice in traditional indigenous applications of ‘the law’. This journey is rather too meandering to be able to provide a common denominator on the ‘why’ of these differences. The author of the conclusion therefore provides only a very open-ended reading of the whole, namely that ‘the manifold invocations of and negotiations around “justice” that we find in this book can be understood as a response to deficit, rather than the reflection of one, that is to say, an engagement with a paradoxically opaque moral, cultural, and legal category as a way to create space within which at least the possibility of alternative futures can be envisioned’ (p. 206). As an optimistic view this may stand, but the cases of the book in reality are too miscellaneous to sustain it. For example, a commonality on the learning processes people go through in their life-long re-interpretation and pursuit of justice is absent in this nevertheless very interesting compilation.

On the whole, this is a much-needed type of publication on ‘anthropologies of justice’ (or of democracy or human rights for that matter), because our analyses of these notions really require insights into local and alternative perceptions and strategies. This compilation makes a substantial contribution, but could have been designed a bit more cohesively.