ABSTRACT
The emergence of truth commissions has been one of the most dramatic developments in transitional justice in the past three decades. They have been widely hailed by many human rights advocates as an important means of dealing with a legacy of gross human rights violations. As we have seen, truth commissions have become a staple of post-conflict peacebuilding due primarily to faith in the power of truth rather than a careful examination of the empirical record. One obvious problem with the literature is that, in general, it is dominated by a few high-profile truth commission cases such as South Africa. With a few notable exceptions, there is a lack of broad comparative analysis. Chapters 3 through 6 provided some evidence that truth commissions can make positive contributions to human rights and, in some circumstances, even democracy. However, it is unclear whether truth commissions generally produce similar outcomes. While there is a growing recognition that more methodological sophistication is necessary to make more definitive judgments as to whether and how truth commissions help societies make a break with their pasts,1 few concrete proposals have yet been forthcoming. Therefore, this chapter takes preliminary steps to address this gap by utilizing cross-national time-series data to provide a broadly comparative quantitative analysis of the impact of truth commissions.
