ABSTRACT
The transitional justice imaginary is normative, performative, and productive. Uncle San lives within transitional justice time. The post-conflict society is metonymically represented by the 'trauma victim', frozen in a regressive, impure, backward 'pre-' state until liberated by transitional justice and its practitioners, who launch it forward to a pure, progressive, liberal democratic state through a given form of 'treatment', the transitional justice mechanism. Uncle San's position of stasis is first destabilized by the Khmer Institute of Democracy (KID) village outreach programme, which 'hails' him toward the transitional justice imaginary. Uncle San, like Cambodia, is imagined as purified, renewed, and remade through the mechanism of the court as he passes through transitional justice time. Here the KID team leader explicitly describes the end point of transitional justice time: a liberal democratic order occupied by the functional, rights-bearing individual, capitalism, and, of course, the qualities that supposedly come with it: peace, happiness, and progress.
