Race and Transitional Justice

This book explores how race and racism are overlooked in transitional justice, revealing how its mechanisms and institutions may reinforce racial hierarchies. The varied contributions debate whether to reform or abandon the field, offering visions for a more emancipatory future.

The discourse, scholarship, and practice of transitional justice have become pivotal to addressing historical systematic injustices. However, until recently, the field has largely overlooked some of the most enduring and pervasive injustices of human history: racism and the colonialism and slave-trade that both reflected and fuelled it. Race and Transitional Justice examines how race and racism interact with transitional justice mechanisms and institutions to question why this is the case, and how it could be different. Bringing together diverse perspectives to examine the historical and socio-political contexts of transitional justice, this book argues that the field remains largely inattentive to the role of race. As a result, transitional justice institutions may be sustaining the very racialization that they are expected to remedy. The contributions offer a range of responses. Some call to abandon the whole field, citing its complicity in the indefinite maintenance of settler hegemony. Others consider transitional justice an essential space to work towards a more just, non-racist, social order. The result is a sensitive reflection into emancipatory transitional justice futures.