Justice in Times of Transition

Catalog description

What kind of justice matters when political regimes change? How should new democracies handle the legacies of a violent past? Should emerging political actors punish perpetrators? Or, instead, should they encourage victims to reconcile with former aggressors? How do ancient and modern experiences of justice differ? Which is a better condition for peace: knowing or not knowing the past? Is there a trade-off between political stability and full disclosure of the past? Taking up such questions, this course asks what we can learn from the contemporary field of Transitional Justice, as well as from its critics. Investigating ideas and practices of punishment, reconciliation, forgiving, and forgetting, students will examine such cases as Argentina, South Africa, East Timor, Egypt, and Brazil. They will examine how the International Criminal Court manages complex issues surrounding international intervention in domestic affairs. How have diverse national experiences of violence yielded varying concepts of justice, reconciliation, and transition? How does political imagination relate to representations of justice in post-conflict films, documentaries, fiction, and testimonial literature?