United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics

In United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice: Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics, Zachary D. Kaufman explores the U.S. government's support for, or opposition to, certain transitional justice institutions. By first presenting an overview of possible responses to atrocities (such as war crimes tribunals) and then analyzing six historical case studies, Kaufman evaluates why and how the United States has pursued particular transitional justice options since World War II.

This book challenges the "legalist" paradigm, which postulates that liberal states pursue war crimes tribunals because their decision-makers hold a principled commitment to the rule of law. Kaufman develops an alternative theory-"prudentialism"-which contends that any state (liberal or illiberal) may support bona fide war crimes tribunals. More generally, prudentialism proposes that states pursue transitional justice options, not out of strict adherence to certain principles, but as a result of a case-specific balancing of politics, pragmatics, and normative beliefs. Kaufman tests these two competing theories through the U.S. experience in six contexts: Germany and Japan after World War II, the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, the 1990-1991 Iraqi offenses against Kuwaitis, the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Kaufman demonstrates that political and pragmatic factors featured as or more prominently in U.S. transitional justice policy than did U.S. government officials' normative beliefs. Kaufman thus concludes that, at least for the United States, prudentialism is superior to legalism as an explanatory theory in transitional justice policymaking.

Zachary D. Kaufman is an International Security Fellow at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Visiting Fellow at both Yale Law School and Yale University's Genocide Studies Program, and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he taught in Yale University's Department of Political Science and George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, and he held fellowships or research positions at the U.S. Supreme Court, Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Dr. Kaufman is the editor of Social Entrepreneurship in the Age of Atrocities: Changing Our World (2012), co-editor (with Phil Clark) of After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond (Oxford, 2009), and author of dozens of articles and book chapters. He holds an MPhil and a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), a J.D. from Yale Law School (where he was an Olin Fellow and Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review), and a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University (where he was student body president).

Prior to academia, Dr. Kaufman served as the first American at the International Criminal Court. In addition, he worked at two other war crimes tribunals (the UN International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda), for a U.S. federal appellate judge, at the U.S. Departments of State and Justice, and in private practice.