ABSTRACT
Transitional justice is beginning to look less like a field and more like kudzu. One, rallying under the banner of ‘transformative justice’, argues that transitional justice should challenge structural violence through bottom-up, participatory, and victim-centric processes. The other group, which includes former UN Special Rapporteur Pablo de Greiff, uses ‘guarantees of non-recurrence’ to ‘help navigate between the insufficiency of transitional justice measures and the risks of overexpansion and continued overpromising that accompany a “transformative” agenda’. Indeed, Daire McGill admits that ‘the meaning of transformative justice is still rather nebulous, with no commonly agreed definition or components’. Given the limited prospects for meaningful transitional justice in the current political context, it’s hard to see what transformative justice has to offer – other than more raised expectations and bitter frustrations. Transformative justice remains vaguely defined and weakly conceptualized. Transformative justice advocates have a tough time pointing to any real-world examples of how it has been, or can be, applied.
