Book Review: From Transitional to Transformative Justice
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663920914001 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | DÁIRE McGILL |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
2020, Vol. 29(6) 925–938
Book Reviews
ª The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0964663920914001
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
PAUL GREADY AND SIMON ROBINS (eds), From Transitional to Transformative Justice.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 313, ISBN 978-1107160934, £85 (hbk).
‘Transitional justice is in crisis’: so begins this book before exploring an alternative
transformative justice (TfJ) approach. Transitional Justice (TJ) has – since the 1980s –
been a major referent in dealing with the legacies of armed conflict and/or authoritarian
rule. Internal and external stakeholders refer to its principles and its toolkit of trials, truth
commissions, reparations and institutional reform which are utilised in almost every
country undergoing transition. Yet TJ has been the subject of increasing critique in
recent years, ranging from the efficacy of particular tools to its overweening legalism,
and from its professionalisation as an industry (Madlingozi, 2010) to its ideological
affinity with the liberal peace paradigm (Franzki and Olarte, 2014). TfJ represents a
systemic critique of TJ, challenging its fundamental aims, ontological stance and meth-
odological approach rather than limiting critique to the flaws of specific reforms, pro-
cesses or mechanisms. The TfJ framework addresses the existence and continuities of
everyday and structural violence, in addition to political violence, by more thoroughly
considering societal causes of conflict and extolling the need for context-specific parti-
cipatory mechanisms (Gready and Robins, 2014).
Having developed over the previous decade mainly as critique, the necessary next
step was to produce empirically grounded TfJ proposals, and 2019 saw the publication of
two edited collections with that explicit aim (cf. Evans, 2019). This book makes an
important contribution to furthering the conceptual underpinnings of TfJ and how the
framework can be instantiated in practice. Part I reproduces the editors’ 2014 article that
distilled somewhat vague and disperse misgivings with actually existing TJ into a rel-
atively coherent conceptual framework for TfJ. Without claiming to represent all pos-
sible instantiations or interpretations, calls are made to attend to (a) the gendered,
racialised and classed impacts of power operating in societal relations and structures;
(b) the mutation and continuation of these impacts into and through transitional periods;
and (c) the radical citizenship potential of...
To continue reading
Request your trial