ABSTRACT
Starting in the early 2000s, transitional justice has increasingly embraced the local by encouraging, employing, and appropriating ‘indigenous’ norms, ‘traditional’ mechanisms, and healing rituals to repair communities affected by mass atrocities. This forms part of the wider turn towards the local in peacebuilding theory and practice. Several concepts are helpful for understanding local transitional justice: the local, legal pluralism, customary law, healing rituals, and everyday justice. The local is commonly seen as the sub-national level, existing below the national and international levels. Legal pluralism is ‘a situation in which two or more legal systems coexist in the same social field’. Transitional justice advocates first took notice of local transitional justice in post-conflict states that had no formal accountability mechanisms. The goals of transitional justice keep multiplying and so become ever more diffi-cult to achieve. Initially, transitional justice was a narrow, legalistic, and pragmatic intervention to aid democratic transitions.
