Capturing transitional justice: exploring Colleen Murphy’s The Conceptual Foundations of Transitional Justice

ABSTRACT

Colleen Murphy’s impressive book presents a unified theory of transitional justice as a single, novel, distinct kind of justice, intended to guide normative evaluation of the choices transitional societies make in dealing with the past. I raise three central challenges to Murphy’s theory. First, how do we know that transitional justice is fundamentally a single special kind of justice that permits a grand unified theory? Second, is it plausible to hold, as Murphy claims, that societal transformation is the overarching aim or objective of transitional justice? Third, is transitional justice convincingly explained as pursuing societal transformation ‘through’ or ‘by’ dealing with past wrongdoing? I argue that Murphy’s ambitious and finely detailed account does not fully reckon with dissensus about transitional justice in the field and does not adequately defend the central claim that transitional justice aims at societal transformation to be pursued by responding to past wrongs.

KEYWORDS:

• Transitional justice
• transformation
• accountability
• justice
• victims
• perpetrators

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Margaret Urban Walker is Donald J. Schuenke Chair in Philosophy Emerita at Marquette University. She is author of Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2007); Moral Contexts (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge University Press, 2006); What is Reparative Justice? (Marquette University Press, 2010). She has published many articles on reparations and reparative truth-telling in the aftermath of conflict, repression, and historical injustice, and has been an invited contributor to research projects with the International Center for Transitional Justice.