Description

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Since the 1980s, an array of legal and non-legal practices—labeled Transitional Justice—has been developed to support post-repressive, post-authoritarian, and post-conflict societies in dealing with their traumatic past. In Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice, the contributors analyze the processes, products, and efficacy of a number of transitional justice mechanisms and look at how genocide, mass political violence, and historical injustices are being institutionally addressed. They invite readers to speculate on what (else) the transcripts produced by these institutions tell us about the past and the present, calling attention to the influence of implicit history conveyed in the narratives that have gained an audience through international criminal tribunals, trials, and truth commissions. Nanci Adler has gathered leading specialists to scrutinize the responses to and effects of violent pasts that provide new perspectives for understanding and applying transitional justice mechanisms in an effort to stop the recycling of old repressions into new ones.  

About the Author

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NANCI ADLER is professor of memory, history, and transitional justice at the University of Amsterdam and program director of genocide studies at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). She is the author of numerous titles, including Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag.  

Praise For…

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"Bringing together some of the most notable voices in the field, this volume moves away from the often narrow focus of other treatments of transitional justice—situating and evaluating the effect of accountability mechanisms within a larger social, cultural, and political context."
— Ronald Slye

“This rich and interesting volume goes beyond the legal understanding of Transitional Justice in order to address the challenge of post-conflict societies. A valuable and important contribution to the current literature.”
— Elazar Barkan

"Chronicle of Higher Education weekly book list," by Nina C. Ayoub
— Chronicle of Higher Education

"With an extraordinary and impressively informative body of seminal scholarship by experts in the subject of transitional justice that is unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library collections, it should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, social activists, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice is also available in a paperback edition and in a digital book format."
— Midwest Book Review