Race and Transitional Justice: An Introduction

• DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5124414
• Publication Date: 2025-02-05T10:39:49Z
• Authors: Sarah Maria Heilt...; Neha Jain
• Keywords: Transitional Justice

Why has the field of transitional justice failed to address one of the greatest injustices of human history: racism? Could it be different? This paper introduces the edited collection Race and Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) that grapples with these questions and explores some potential responses. The contributions show that while race is an important aspect of many of the crimes that transitional justice is supposed to address and of the historical and socio-political contexts in which transitional justice mechanisms work, the field in fact has a poor sensitivity to the concept of race. As a result, transitional justice institutions may be sustaining the very racialisation that they could be expected to remedy. We identify two structural features that make it challenging for transitional justice to address racism: the legalization of transitional justice and epistemic injustices in transitional justice. The contributions vary in their hopes for redemption, ranging from calls to abandon the whole field because of its complicity in the indefinite maintenance of settler hegemony to the view that transitional justice provides an essential space to work towards a more just, non-racist, social order.