ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a case for treating exceptional institutions as sui generis. It takes a critical look at exceptional institutions as 'transformative rituals' and reflects on how far the analogy between transition and revolution can to be pressed. Though the codification of the Nuremberg principles into international law has done a great deal to legitimate it retrospectively, the mist of arbitrariness surrounding the international criminal tribunal as an institution has never quite lifted and continues to plague subsequent iterations in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Looked at from a political perspective, this appropriation of the revolutionary notion of the 'new beginning' for transitional settings has an inherently ambiguous quality. The chapter argues that the injustices of the past live on after the 'transformative event' and require political communities to sustain a 'work of memory' – a work, that is, of continually sifting through the past and digesting its significance with respect to keeping faith with the promise of 'never again'.
