Transitional Justice in Illiberal Times extd.

The term “transitional justice” rose to prominence after 1995, when the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) published its three-volume series Transitional Justice (Kritz, ed). In the decades since, and corresponding to the end of the Cold War and defeat of the Soviet Union, the field appeared to flourish. Scholars produced hundreds of dissertations and monographs exploring its core concepts, ethical dilemmas, and paradigmatic cases. Institutional entrepreneurs established well-funded centers in the epicenters of global commerce and knowledge. Activists and lawyers across the erstwhile West operationalized its frameworks across dozens of political and constitutional transitions, generating what some described as a “justice cascade.”

This expansion, however, was predicated on a number of conceptual blind spots. Transitional justice and its “enterpreneurs” (Madlingozi) rarely achieved self-consciousness about its own presuppositions as a field, most especially the end for which its various “mechanisms” were presumed to be means. During the 1990s and early 2000s, that end was largely taken for granted: transitional justice operated within a historiography which assumed that history would either bend, or could be made to bend, toward the goal of increasing respect for human rights, pluralism, openness, and tolerance. Wherever these terms predominated, there was little need for the field to define its core concepts with precision or rigor, for the meanings of both “transition” and “justice” were largely secured in advance by a broadly liberal and cosmopolitan teleology—one that occluded the structural historical conditions of inequity, for example, and marginalized alternative models and intellectual traditions of justice.

Beginning at least in the mid-2010s, however, this teleology began to come into question. Many established democracies have since witnessed the rise of what Marlene Laruelle (2020) defines as illiberalism: a thin but coherent ideology that positions itself as a permanent backlash against liberalism and embraces exercises of sovereign power in the name of majoritarian nationalism and cultural homogeneity. On these terms, “transition” need not culminate in liberal consolidation, and “justice” need not be tethered to cosmopolitan norms.

One question that presents itself at this juncture is what becomes of transitional justice when its animating teleology dissolves and its blind spots no longer occlude radical alternatives. Another, counterintuitively, is how might a certain illiberalism have been internal to transitional justice from the outset.

Transitional justice, after all, has often authorized departures from ordinary liberal legal norms in the name of political necessity. As a field, it has tolerated retroactive criminalization and creative reinterpretations of legality, embraced exceptional or hybrid tribunals detached from ordinary constitutional courts, justified lustration policies that restrict political participation without individualized criminal conviction, relied on expansive executive discretion in negotiating amnesties, endorsed truth commissions that trade procedural guarantees for narrative authority, and sometimes has subordinated due process, equal protection, and the presumption of innocence to the imperatives of semblances of historical reckoning and collective transformation.

Do these departures from liberal legal norms represent temporary, prudential suspensions in service of liberal restoration? Or do they reveal a deeper affinity between transitional justice and forms of sovereign exceptionalism more commonly associated with illiberal politics? If it’s true that transitional justice embraced the suspension of liberal legal norms as a means to the end of its own liberal and cosmopolitan ends, how then do we understand its relation to the exercises of sovereign power we witness today, which suspend those same norms for very different ends? To what extent, if at all, might the field’s self-confidence in its own liberal goals have obscured the ways in which it normalized some of the same extra-legal “mechanisms” that illiberal regimes have since appropriated for their own goals? To what extent, if at all, might the illiberalism of our present oblige us to rethink transitional justice itself? And might alternative conceptions of time and justice that are neither liberal nor illiberal yet be discerned in a moment of rising illiberalism?

The workshop seeks to excavate this predicament through provocations by and discussions amongst invited scholars and practitioners from across a number of settings in which late 20^th century experiments with technologies of transitional justice have surfaced the questions raised above. 

Kritz, Neil J., ed. Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes. Vols. I–III. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995.

Laruelle, Marlene. “Illiberalism: A Conceptual Introduction.” East European Politics 36, no. 3 (2020): 303–327

Madlingozi, Tshepo. “On Transitional Justice Entrepreneurs and the Production of Victims.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 13, no. 2 (2010): 209-226

Sitze, Adam. The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013.

The workshop opens with an introduction by Heidi Grunebaum and Adam Sitze in which the conceptual proposition of the gathering is unpacked: The field of Transitional Justice might offer itself as a politico-legal repertoire for contemporary transitions of illiberal regimes. This will be followed by an open discussion in response to the introduction as well as to Adam Sitze’s pre-circulated texts. A sound installation “Murmurs, or the Scar of Nature” by former commissioner of the Colombian truth commission, Alejandro Castillejo-Cuellar will further open questions that will be explored during the workshop. On Wednesday 29 April, we will reprise key workshop themes of temporality, violence, restitution, law and the senses through a talk or presentation by one of the workshop participants followed by roundtable discussions.

Brendan Ciarán Browne (Trinity College, Belfast)

Alejandro Castillejo-Cuellar (University of the Andes, Bogotá)

Ini Dele-Adedeji (University of Leicester/ LIAS)

Heidi Grunebaum (CHR, Cape Town/LIAS)

Arthur Muliro (SID, Rome)

Adam Sitze (Amherst College, Amherst/MA)

Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University, Atlanta)

Tuesday, 28. April 2026

14:00 – 14:30 Introduction

by Adam Sitze & Heidi Grunebaum

14:30 – 15:15 Listening to the Trouble with Transitional Justice

“Murmurs, or the Scar of Nature” (Sound Installation by Alejandro Castillejo-Cuellar) Discussion with Heidi Grunebaum

15:15 – 15:30 Break

15:30 – 17:30 Panel I: Propositions on Transitional Justice in illiberal times

Discussion led by Adam Sitze

18:00 – 20:00 Staatskunst & Staatsraison: Art about the State

Tobi Haslett, Writer

Tom Holert, Art Historian, Critic, Curator

20:00 Reception at Kunstraum

Wednesday, 29. April 2026

Venue: Zentralgebäude Leuphana Universität C40.704

09:30 – 11:30 Panel II: On the Duration of Violence

Alejandro Castillejo-Cuellar: Violence as continuum: On the Rainforest’s elusive Testimony

Ini Dele-Adedeji: Neither victims nor perpetrators: Transitional Justice and the Collapse of Categories

11:30 – 12:00 Break

12:00 – 13:30 Panel III: On Time

Arthur Muliro: On the burden of history and the foreclosure of futures

13:30 – 14:30 Lunch Break

14:30 – 16:00 Panel IV: (In)justice and the Force of “Peace-making”

Brendan Ciarán Browne: Transitional (in)Justice and enforcing the ‘peace’ on Palestine

16:00 –16:30 Break

16:30 – 18:00 Panel V: On Restitution

 Jelena Subotic: Global politics of restitution in illiberal times

18:00 – 18:30 Break

18:30 – 19:30 Concluding Reflections

 Moderators: Adam Sitze, Heidi Grunebaum

20:00 Dinner at Mälzer Brewery and Restaurant

Please note that the workshop programme on Tuesday 28 April will take place at Kunstraum, while the programme on Wednesday 29 April will take place at C40.704, central building of Leuphana University.

This workshop is hosted by Adam Sitze (Amherst College, USA), Heidi Grunebaum (UWC, South Africa) and the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS).