Race and Transitional Justice

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 mechanisms and institutions to 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, citing its complicity in the indefinite maintenance of settler hegemony. Others consider transitional justice an essential space to work towards a more just, non-racist, social order. The result is a sensitive reflection into emancipatory transitional justice futures.

Neha Jain, Professor of Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law,Sarah M.H. Nouwen, Professor of International Law, European University Institute

Neha Jain is Professor of Law and Deputy Director and Faculty Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. She has previously worked at the European University Institute, where she served both as Professor of Public International Law and as the Co-Director of the Academy of European Law. Professor Jain is also a permanent visiting professor at MOBILE, the Danish National Research Foundation's Center for Excellence for Global Mobility Law. She is a member of the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and the European Journal of International Law and has been a member of the American Society of International Law's Executive Council and Executive Committee and former Vice-President of the European Society of International Law.


Sarah M.H. Nouwen is a Professor of Public International Law at the European University Institute. She is on leave from the University of Cambridge, where she is a Professor in Public International Law and was for many years Co-Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and Fellow of Pembroke College. Professor Nouwen is Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law. She has also worked in international diplomacy at the Dutch mission to the United Nations, at the Netherlands Embassy in Khartoum, and as a Senior Legal Advisor to the African Union High Level Implementation Panel in Sudan.

Foreword: Reclaiming Racial Justice, Barney Afako1. Race and Transitional Justice, Neha Jain and Sarah M.H. Nouwen2. Mapping Critiques of the Treatment of Race and Racism in Transitional Justice, Colleen Murphy3. Haunting Justice: Racing and De-racing through Transitional Justice, Zinaida Miller4. Human Rights, Human Wrongs: "A More Demanding Relationship to History", Vasuki Nesiah5. Clumsy Ethnography: How Genocide Lawyers Re-Racialized Darfur, Edward Thomas6. Racialized Exclusion through Universal Jurisdiction Trials: Thinking with and against Transitional Justice, Nicola Palmer7. Transitional Justice as Epistemicide: On Steve Biko's Pluralist Co-existence 'after' Conflict, Tshepo Madlingozi