Suspended in 2025/26
IR324      Half Unit
The Practices of Transitional Justice

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Pre-requisites:

Students must have completed IR200 and IR203 before taking this course.

This taught seminar introduces students to the theory and history of transitional justice.  It explores the logic of amnesties, apologies, memorials, lustrations, reparations, trials, truth commission, and related responses to genocide, crimes against humanity, and other mass atrocities.  Examining the whole array of historical and contemporary solutions to the problems of 'radical evil' (Immanuel Kant), the seminar assesses the conditions for - and limitations to - achieving order, truth, and justices in domestic politics and international affairs.  Utilising insights from political science, law, history, sociology, and philosophy, the seminar will compare alternative institutional designs and divergent choices and consider their real, and imagined, social, political and economic consequences across space and time, from Athens to South Africa to Libya.

1 hours of seminars in the Spring Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

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

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the WT.

Students are required to research and write one essay (2,500 words). In addressing a given essay topic, students must seek to integrate, where applicable, theory and history and bring empirical evidence to bear on the research question they have chosen. Essays must be fully—and carefully—referenced using one of the major conventions consistently. Submissions are due in Week 8 and must be made in hard copy. Feedback is provided by the course teacher, who is responsible for marking essays.

Several criteria are applied in the evaluation of student essays, notably: (1) Originality of argument: How unexpected is the advanced claim? (2) Use of literature: Has relevant scholarship been digested and put to good use? (3) Soundness of analysis: Is the inquiry comprehensive and logically consistent? (4) Organisation of evidence: Have argument and evidence been introduced and presented in a compelling manner? (5) Validity of findings: Does the argument remain valid when applied empirically? (6) Clarity of presentation: Are grammar, punctuation, and references flawless?

Indicative reading list:

Jon Elster, Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: CUP, 2004)

Jens Meierhenrich, Alexander Laban Hinton and Lawrence Douglas (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice (Oxford: OUP, 2017)

Tricia D Losen, Leigh A Payne and Andrew G Reiter (eds), Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Processes, Weighing Efficacy (Washington DC: USIP, 2010)

Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf (eds), Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010)

Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (New York: Norton, 2011) 

Exam (100%), duration: 120 Minutes in the Spring exam period