EU485      Half Unit
Post-Conflict Justice and Reconciliation in Europe and Beyond

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The pursuit of justice in the aftermath of mass atrocity and gross human rights violations has been a norm in a globalised post-Cold War world. It has rested on the premise that states and societies ought to engage with the difficult past in order to transition from conflict to peace and from an illiberal to liberal regime. But, the limitations of transitional justice practices, such as war crimes trials, truth commissions, reparations and others, are now evident. Instead of promoting peace and reconciliation, they have often had the opposite impact: they have further divided communities, distorted the truth about suffering, and traumatised rather than dignified the victims. With a comparative focus on transitional justice practices in Europe and elsewhere, this course tackles the puzzle of their unintended effects. It also considers the implications of current contestation of global liberal order and the norm of non-impunity. 

The course starts with a review of transitional justice and reconciliation as fields of study and practice. Following the introductory part that relates the emergence of a global norm of transitional justice to the lessons from Europe’s history, the course proceeds with an examination of key mechanisms of transitional justice in various contexts: international trials, truth and reconciliation commissions, and lustrations. It then engages with more recent practices, such as the role of arts and social media in transitional justice and reconciliation. Some of the examples we will examine include the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, domestic war crimes trials in Ukraine, hybrid trials in Cambodia, the de-Baathification process in Iraq, photography about the Rwandan genocide and digital memory activism in relation to the war in Syria. Throughout the course and through these empirical examples we also examine cross-cutting themes, such as: gender, trauma, emotions, silence, resilience, colonialism, and others, and their role in reckoning with past wrongs. 

Theoretically informed and empirically grounded, the course adopts a multidisciplinary approach to address the question of evidence, and examine how we know the effects of transitional justice. It reflects critically on theorising, methods, and data in transitional justice research, and discusses implications for policy-making.

15 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

The course will provide or mediate additional learning opportunities, such as research seminars on topics directly linked to the theme(s) covered in the course. These will serve to reinforce learning objectives by creating an opportunity for students to engage with core issues outside regular classes.

Presentation

Essay

• Bakiner, Onur (2016) Truth Commissions: Memory, Power, and Legitimacy (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press)
• Campbell, Kirsten (2023) The Justice of Humans: Subject, Society and Sexual Violence in International Criminal Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
• Chinkin, Christine and Kaldor, Mary (2018) International Law and New Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
• Cohen, Stanley (2000) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press)
• Fridman, Orli (2022) Memory Activism and Digital Practices After Conflict (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press)
• Heller, Kevin Jon (2011) The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Hughes, James and Denisa Kostovicova (eds) (2018) Rethinking Reconciliation and Transitional Justice After Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge)
• Kostovicova, Denisa (2023) Reconciliation by Stealth: How People Talk About War Crimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press)
• Orentlicher, Diane (2018) Some Kind of Justice: The ICTY’s Impact in Bosnia and Serbia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
• Roht-Arriaza, Naomi, Mariezcurrena, Javier (eds) (2006) Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
• Sharp, Dustin N. (2018), Rethinking Transitional Justice for the Twenty-First Century: Beyond the End of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
• Shaw, Rosalind, Waldorf, Lars, Hazan, Pierre (eds) (2010) Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
• Teitel, Ruti (2013) Humanity’s Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Essay (100%, 3500 words)