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 institutions and mechanisms and 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 because of its complicity in the indefinite maintenance of settler hegemony. Others consider transitional justice as an essential space to work towards a more just, non-racist, social order. The result is the sensitive reflection on emancipatory transitional justice futures.
The book is available in Cadmus.
Cadmus also includes all the previous volumes in the Collected Courses series.