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Review Essay
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Justice and truth in transition.
Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 402 pp.
Richard J. Goldstone, For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 152 pp. Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch World Report 2001 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001), 540 pp., online at http://www.hrw.org/wr2kl. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 214 pp. Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 292 pp. Pinochet. Milosevic. Sharon. Kissinger. What have they in common? As agents of the state, each has in turn come under investigation by the agents of one or more other states in connection with alleged war crimes or crimes against humanity. Does lawyers-without-borders activism with its advance on universal jurisdiction herald progress toward ideals of justice beyond the impunity bestowed by state boundaries? Does such activism instead bespeak the chaos of a global legal system wherein initiators of self-help measures run amok in pursuit of foreigners' individual accountability-or local political gain? This enquiry, informed by a non-governmental organization's comprehensive document exposing current human rights abuses, and stimulated by four individually authored, scholarly studies, inelegantly concedes that some of each possibility may be obtained. We conclude untidily that no one holds answers to the perplexities and moral quandaries of bystandership in this troubled world. Transition Studies Analyses of societies' quests for justice and truth following oppressive leadership might be termed "transition studies." The transitions in question bear some affinity to what an earlier generation of international relations (IR) scholars called peaceful change. Ordinarily, peaceful change referred to the alteration of control over territory; Norway's separation from Sweden long presented a prized example until postwar decolonization, bequeathing nominally independent new states, offered many more illustrations. Transition, however, emphasizes not alteration of terri...See the full content of this document
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