Book Review: Transitional Justice and the Historical Abuses of Church and State
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231222920 |
| Author | Catherine Turner |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
JAMES GALLEN, Transitional Justice and the Historical Abuses of Church and State. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp. 400, ISBN 9781316515549, £95 (hbk).
‘Organised violence is a central feature of the Christian tradition, the Roman Catholic
Church, the British Empire and nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia,
the United Kingdom and Ireland’(p. 24).
This provocation is the foundation of James Gallen’s new monograph interrogating the role
of transitional justice in accountability for the historic abuses of both church and state world-
wide. Transitional justice as both a legal and political project has increasingly been advocated
and used as a framework for reckoning with historic abuses. From slavery in the United States,
to residential schools for indigenous children in Canada and Australia, and Magdalene
Laundries and mother and baby homes in Ireland and the UK, mechanisms of transitional
justice have been either used or proposed as a forum for pursuing accountability.
In this book, Gallen asks whether transitional justice as it is currently designed is
capable of adequately responding to the legacies of historic abuse. Interrogating the
ability of transitional justice to extend beyond individual abuses to take account of the
structural forces that sustained them, the book offers three contributions to the field of
transitional justice. First, it develops a compelling theoretical account of the relationship
between individual abuse and structural violence, stitching together a detailed analysis of
the linkages between the violence of the foundational myths of the nation and the discrim-
inatory social structures that enable individual abuses. Second, it offers a conceptual
framework for understanding the linked forces of power and emotions in assessing the
impact of historical abuse. Finally, it rethinks, with reference to detailed examples, the
utility of transitional justice mechanisms in addressing historical abuse.
Turning first to the relationship between the foundational myths of state and abuse,
Gallen’s analysis centres on the concept of ‘othering’and the way in which narratives
of political or religious virtue enabled discrimination and abuse against those who did
not conform to the mythical ideal of the state. The book offers a wealth of examples
from across the five jurisdictions of the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and
the UK, to demonstrate how hierarchies of value and inferiority related to race, ethnicity
and gender enabled and sustained the existence of coercive institutions to control those
deemed to be socially problematic.
Gallen’s central proposition is that this logic of ‘othering’continues to structure rela-
tions in the modern day, evident in persistent systemic and widespread structures of harm,
inequality and discrimination seen in the tangible examples of racial inequality, discrim-
ination against indigenous communities and violence against women. Yet as Gallen high-
lights, this claim is politically contested, and division over how to account for the past
shapes the possibilities of state-led transitional justice mechanisms when it comes to
accounting for historical abuse.
Transitional justice mechanisms, where they have been created to address legacies of
historic abuse, have focused predominantly on abuses committed in state run or religious
institutions. This approach has steered transitional justice initiatives down a particular
path of determining liability for individualised harms within the system rather than a
broader approach of questioning social responsibility for enabling those harms. Some
Book Reviews 671
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