Book Review: Families of the Missing: A Test for Contemporary Approaches to Transitional Justice
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Author | Augustine SJ Park |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663914546586b |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Social & Legal Studies 23(4)
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SIMON ROBINS, Families of the Missing: A Test for Contemporary Approaches to Transitional Justice,
Abingdon, Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2013; pp. 264, ISBN 9780415812481, £80 (hbk).
What would transitional justice that is determined by victims look like? This is precisely
the question that readers confront in Simon Robins’ Families of the Missing: A Test of
Contemporary Approaches to Transitional Justice. Robins’ ambitious book offers a ‘bot-
tom-up’ challenge to the transitional justice paradigm, animated by globalized dis-
courses of human rights and materialized in the one-size-fits-all mechanisms of trials,
truth commissions and reparations. Robins advocates for a victim-centered approach
to transitional justice that is grounded in victims’ own articulation of their needs, rather
than rooted in abstract, alien discourses of rights. As such, responses to mass political
violence must be contextual and locally driven, in contrast to an elite-driven ‘mimetic’
approach of superimposing internationalized models onto local contexts. Based on com-
parative ethnographies of Nepal and Timor Leste, Families of the Missing focuses on dis-
appearances, understanding surviving families and community members as victims who
exemplify both the egregious nature of harms experienced in times of political violence
and the demands that victims may advance in the transitions that follow.
Robins’ objectives are both broadly oriented to testing the limits of current transi-
tional justice discourse and practice, and more narrowly focused on the particularities
of disappearance as it is experienced in his two case sites. Chapter 1 lays out the core
arguments of the book, highlighting the disjuncture between current transitional justice
and peacebuilding orthodoxies and the everyday lives of victims, while calling for tran-
sitional justice that engages the needs of victims. Chapter 2 elaborates the conceptual
tools of the study, centrally the concepts of needs and ambiguous loss. Here, the author
also summarizes criticisms of truth commissions, reparations, and trials from a victim-
centered perspective, concluding that victims’ demands...
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