Transitional Justice / Atrocities Regime
THE INTERNATIONAL NORMATIVE STRUCTURE OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE by ALANA ERIN TIEMESSEN BA, McGill University, 2001 MA, University of British Columbia, 2003 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Political Science) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2011 ©Alana Erin Tiemessen, 2011 ABSTRACT Transitional justice is a field of research that has benefited from an array of scholarship on accountability for atrocities, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. But the emphasis on varieties of institutional design, such as trials and truth commissions, and the primacy of pragmatic and context- specific variables have obscured the fact that transitional justice is increasingly a norm-driven practice. The field, however, lacks a theoretical framework from which to assess the international norms that consistently have causal effects in diverse contexts and over the past decades in which the normative structure has evolved. I argue that the international normative structure of transitional justice is defined by four interrelated norms: a hierarchical division of criminality, accountability, localization, and reconciliation. The primary contribution of this dissertation is to explain the effects of this structure with a comparative analysis of each norm’s salience and implementation. I therefore juxtapose what is expected in principle to what is possible in practice. Measures of salience go beyond establishing if norms exist and determine how norms matter, as is shown by their role in shaping discourse, institutions and policies. Subsequently I contend that it is important to distinguish between implementation challenges that are institutional failures, such as a lack of capacity or politicization of the process, and those which are normative contestation, such as reinterpretations and challenges over how and whether a norm should be implemented in a certain context.
[Show full text]