This first substantive chapter introduces readers to Truth Commissions as an institution and their relationship with international law; the core problem examined in the book, and the overall argument; the main debates in scholarship and practice, which frame the book’s intervention; and the book’s methodological approach and contribution. The chapter begins with an overview of Truth Commissions, their contemporary role, and historical transformation. The discussion focuses on how the jurisprudential tradition of ‘jurisdictional thought’ offers a way of examining how Truth Commissions have ‘authorized’ their accounts of violent events as the truth by drawing on different dimensions of international law. The chapter explains how the book approaches the analysis of Truth Commissions through the study of their representations of truth and authority. This involves setting out the book’s theoretical orientation, which includes the jurisprudence of jurisdictional thought, law and humanities scholarship, and the theory and history of international law; and explaining the importance of the author’s in-country visits and archival research.

This chapter examines the relationship between human rights and Chile’s 1990-1991 National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, and the way this relationship continues to shape state-society relations in the aftermath of Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990). The argument is two-fold. First, the Truth Commission draws on the language of human rights to authorize its account as the ‘major’ truth. Second, in doing so, the Truth Commission displaces from public life ‘minor’ truths, specifically the experiences of state-violence by Indigenous communities (Mapuche people) and women (Arpilleristas). The argument is based on an analysis of the representation of truth and authority embodied in Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights. The chapter shows how the Museum gives continuity to the work of the Truth Commission by giving it a material (spatial and experiential) form. While the Truth Commission and the Museum remain two distinct institutions, in visiting the Museo/Truth Commission it becomes apparent how human rights authorizes the Truth Commission’s account, and how the Museo gives it continuity in public life.

The book concludes with a short chapter that invites readers to re-consider the relationship between Truth Commissions and international law. It emphasizes the consequences of this relationship for the quality of state-society relations in the aftermath of violent conflict. It also highlights the importance of paying attention to who is authorizing the inclusion of local cultural expressions of violent conflict in the accounts produced by Truth Commission; who benefits from such inclusions; and what ends are being served.

This is the book’s ‘exit’ chapter. It examines how, following the success of the Truth Commissions in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador, Truth Commissions were given an ‘origins story’. The argument is that this occurred in the 1990s through the retrospective redescription of Uganda’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry as the ‘inaugural’ Truth Commission. The 1974 Commission of Inquiry was established as part of Idi Amin’s response to international pressure from human rights groups (particularly the International Commission of Jurists). The chapter discusses how the redescription of the Commission of Inquiry began at the end of the Cold War, with the publication of an article by Richard Carver in 1990, and in 1994 with an article by Priscilla Hayner. The redescription of the Commission of Inquiry as a ‘Truth Commission’ turns on the extent to which it is considered an institution that advanced human rights, which shows how the authority of Truth Commissions has depended on their connection to international law from the ‘beginning’.

This chapter examines the role of international law and institutions in El Salvador’s UN Truth Commission (1992-1993). This was the first Truth Commission to be established by the UN after the Cold War. It argues that the Truth Commission drew on the identity and status of the UN as an international institution to authorize its account about the unlawfulness of the violence of the civil war. In turn, the UN-Truth Commission’s account displaced ‘other’ accounts (of peasant and Indigenous communities) which were seen to rival international law’s understanding of the violence. In particular, by excluding an account of the socio-economic circumstances of the civil war, which remained a source of conflict in the country, the UN was able to claim that it had contributed to making El Salvador a ‘model’ post-conflict state. To show this, the chapter juxtaposes the Truth Commission’s account with a rival account embroidered in a tapestry, hand-made by a Salvadoran woman living in a refugee camp in the 1980s, which represents the Sumpul River Massacre. The chapter shows how the tapestry exposes the socio-economic roots of the civil war – a truth that the Truth Commission displaces and renders irrelevant for post-conflict state-society relations.

This chapter analyses how the Argentinian Truth Commission (CONADEP 1983-1984) accounted for the dictatorship’s state-violence, and how international law is involved in the making of this account as truth. The argument is that the Truth Commission draws on international law’s promises of peace and democracy to authorize its account as truth. In turn, the Truth Commission deauthorizes, and thereby silences, accounts of the dictatorship’s state-violence that do not conform with the official version embedded in, and mobilized by, the promises of international law of the late-Cold War. To show this, I read the Prologue to the Truth Commission’s Final Report as a literary text that not only works to establish the account that is set out in the Final Report, but that also authorizes that account as the truth by connecting it to international law. This reading of the Prologue to the Final Report’s textual representation of truth and authority draws on scholarship in the field of law and literature. The chapter also discusses the ongoing role of the Prologue in Argentina’s contemporary public life, particularly during the Kircher, Macri and Milei governments.

Reparation programmes for redressing human rights harms form a central pillar of transitional justice. Reviews about the success of such programmes, however, remain mixed: in terms of outcomes, they often fail to meet the justice needs of affected populations; in terms of process, there is agreement about the importance of meaningful participation, but only a minimal understanding of how to carry this out effectively. To develop a sound theoretical framework to guide actors interested in developing reparations programmes, this chapter builds on the theory of relational justice to provide both an instrumental and legal justification for inclusive processes in the design, implementation, and evaluation of reparations programmes. We argue that reparative processes should be mindful of building and repairing relations, especially between affected populations and the government that failed to protect them. We conclude by proposing four criteria we believe are fundamental for taking a relational justice approach to reparations.

This chapter develops the theoretical explanation of why transitional justice processes and the reckoning of a repressive history can prevent the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence in new democracies. It first discusses a new conception of organized crime where complicit state specialists in violence are central players in illicit economies and in the production of large-scale criminal violence. It suggests that these engagements often emerge in autocracies, where autocrats allow military and police forces to capitalize on their repressive power to kill political dissidents and on their de facto impunity to control the criminal underworld. If left unaccountable, authoritarian specialists in violence can become leading actors in the production of criminal violence in democracy by defecting to fight turf wars or defending organized criminal groups from positions of power or spearheading Wars on Drugs, Gangs, or Crime. It claims that when new democratic elites expose and sanction authoritarian specialists in violence through robust truth commissions and criminal trials, they unleash a powerful accountability shock that breaks state impunity and deters security forces from using state coercive power to control illicit economies through lethal force. Failure to reckon with a repressive history, and the survival of the violent state, sets new democracies on trajectories of power abuse and criminal wars.

This chapter presents the statistical analysis of the main theoretical propositions across countries. It first discusses the sample of seventy-six Third Wave democracies (1974–2005), why the homicide rate is used as the metric of criminal violence, and the different indices created to capture various dimensions of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws. It then explains why we test for the immediate and cumulative impacts of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws and their joint effects. Using the global sample and a subsample of seventeen Latin American countries, the results indicate that truth commissions have a strong deterrent effect on the murder rate and criminal prosecution only has an impact when combined with truth commissions. The joint effect of truth and justice represents the accountability shock’s violence-reducing effect. The shock is more powerful in the Latin American subsample. Additional models reveal two crucial points: (1) to have an effect, the accountability shock needs to be robust; and (2) the effect of the accountability shock (absent other measures) expires after about ten years. The positive association between amnesty laws and higher homicide rates reinforces the conclusion that persistent state impunity promotes violence, underscoring the importance of accountability for past atrocities as necessary for future violence reduction.

This and the following chapter look at how infusing corruption into areas of human-rights related practice could make a difference. Here I consider transitions from dictatorship or internal armed conflict, and in particular how transitional justice has dealt with corruption. I focus on 3 emblematic transitions from different recent time periods: South Africa, Tunisia and Colombia, and add in some lessons from prior discussion of Guatemala. I find that failure to vet and control military intelligence officers, economic privatization and decentralization, and lack of attention to judicial selection and to auditing, tax and other controls contribute to the emergence of powerful alliances of corrupt officials, organized crime and predatory elites.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the psychosocial literature on personal narratives, in general, and in connection to genocide and war, in particular. We begin with the concept of societies’ master narratives, emphasizing their long-term impacts on people’s personal narratives of genocide and war. We then look at the main characteristics and uses of personal narratives in psychosocial research. From there, we briefly present and discuss archives of personal narratives of survivors of gross human rights’ violations and their use in different truth commissions, followed by usages of personal narratives in research of genocide and war in different places in the world. Our focus in this chapter is mainly (though not exclusively) on the contexts of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian/Arab–Jewish conflicts.

Chapter 6 argues that inquiries, whether traditional public inquiries, to more innovative and participatory forms of truth and reconciliation commissions, can enable episodic uses of power from victim-survivors and advocates, evidenced in the nature and extent of consultation and ownership of the process and the opportunity to engage with and influence the inquiry’s operations. Inquiries may shape the nature and function of the articulated emotions of victim-survivors but also have a significant emotional and potentially retraumatising effect for victim-survivors. The chapter argues that these episodic uses of power and experiences of emotional disclosure in well-designed inquiries or commissions will necessarily raise the expectations of victim-survivors for other elements of justice, including structural justice, to be addressed through and beyond other mechanisms of transitional justice.

This chapter discusses the place of conflict in transitional justice. Building on a range of historical real-life examples, it argues that conflict is an important rather than incidental part of many, if not all, transitional justice processes. The chapter initially focuses on value conflicts and then turns to conflicts of interests (political power, offices, money, etc.). Drawing on recent realist work in political theory, the chapter argues that it is time to give politics its due and idealisation a rest in transitional justice. This is not an argument against ideals, but against an approach that is idealistic in the wrong sense, in such a way as to suppress, erase from view, real experiences of conflict. Towards the end, the chapter explores recent attempts in the transitional justice literature to take conflict more seriously, particularly Christine Bell’s account of transitional justice as bargaining.

Chapter 9 focuses on transitional justice, the challenge of tackling past human rights violations, in contemporary Latin America. It shows that the record of Latin American countries varies considerably, but that, in the aggregate, the record of Latin America is largely a success story. The frequency with which past human rights violations have been addressed, and the steps taken through truth commissions and human rights trials, puts Latin America at the center of the global transitional justice movement. It also demonstrates, through a comparative analysis of six countries (Brazil and Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala, Chile and Argentina), that several factors determine the response to past human rights violations. Democracies that are strong and channel citizen preferences succeed in confronting the challenge of transitional justice. Additionally, a strong record of transitional justice is associated with strong civil society organizations, generational change and new legal thinking about human rights law in the judiciary, and progressive developments in international law.

National and international lawyers are ubiquitous in transitional political negotiations. However, their role in advancing or stalling negotiations, or in advocating or resisting progressive change, is generally carried out behind closed doors. This chapter explores when and how lawyers living and working within repressive, conflicted, and transitional states influence the content of transitional political agreements. It draws on twenty-five interviews with lawyers who participated directly in negotiations and other informed commentators in our case study sites. Combining this empirical data with literature on lawyers as negotiators, the sociology of the legal profession, and critical international legal theory, the chapter explores the factors that shape relationships between lawyers and the political leadership in negotiations. The chapter further critically analyses the extent to which lawyers’ negotiating styles and legal skills can advance or inhibit the reaching of an agreement. The final section explores the discretion and capacity of lawyer-negotiators for legal imagination in crafting transitional futures. We find that lawyer-negotiations often have to grapple with reconciling their role as legal technicians with the ethical and political challenges of advising on law’s content at times when the law itself is indeterminate or subject to negotiation.