Transitional Justice and Enduring Imagination

Abstract

International law scholarship ages unevenly. It is a rich and —for the willing— diverse field, which makes diving into libraries and archives an exciting journey that might take one to a variety of teachings, preoccupations, approaches, and destinations. We might not, however, find everything quite exciting, and time has been unkind to certain earlier dominant strands — with good reason. For instance, a number of perspectives contemporary to the international legal developments that accompanied the post-1989 rise of liberal internationalism —from the ad-hoc international criminal tribunals to humanitarian intervention— appear superficial and dismissive of particular experiences and necessities — evoking Koskenniemi’s powerful indictment of the “turn to ethics”. It was at this very time, twenty years ago, that Ruti Teitel’s seminal Transitional Justice was first published. This book, however, remains as necessary as when first published. Among Transitional Justice’s many virtues, I want to focus on one that stands out as a reason to keep returning to the book, even when not working strictly within the field of transitional justice: its call for legal imagination. [...]

Keywords: Transitional justice, book review