Too Long a Sacrifice? Post-Transitional Justice and the Afterlives of Authoritarianism

This joint-authored review essay considers the mid and long term outworkings and implications of transitional justice decisions and actions in or about post-authoritarian settings by analysing how selected examples of recent scholarship speak to meso-level TJ theory or practice. Considering, in turn, the nature, timing, causes, and effects of initial, medium-, or long-term subsequent TJ actions about or featuring Central/ Eastern European and South American settings, it deals with a number of putative drivers of post-transitional justice configurations and assesses the relative robustness of actor-focused explanations over structural-institutional, or historical-institutional alternatives. On balance, and allowing for a certain unevenness in execution of the texts discussed, the essay underlines the importance of sustained attention to transitional justice’s ‘origin story’ cases, while diagnosing certain tendencies that TJ scholarship may need to guard against. These include underplaying or misapprehending the relative importance of law and rule-of-law contexts as causal mechanisms; undue optimism about the likely durability and/or benign character of post-transitional formal democracies, and failing to fully interrogate the assumed benefits that derive from successful post-transitional prosecution of core atrocity crime.