Transitional justice and development: making connections

Transitional justice and development complement and, to an extent, define the other. As the majority of conflicts take place within countries at low levels of development any post-conflict transitional justice efforts – be it truth commissions; reparations or the purging of security services – will be challenged by weak institutions, poor governance and high levels of insecurity. Conversely developing countries’ progress may be impeded by significant human rights abuses in their past and the subsequent inability of respective societies to forge an enjoined community.

Transitional justice initiatives require significant investment and need to be considered along with other competing needs in relation to any development funding. However, such can be the fundamental nature of justice efforts to society - individual and collective reparations, property restitution, rehabilitation, and reintegrating victims and perpetrators – that development work can be greatly facilitated. For instance marginalisation may be addressed, along with exclusion and vulnerability, which in turn brings people and groups into the economy, empowering them as citizens, and aiding economic activity.

This book seeks to examine the relationship between the field of transitional justice and the field of development. As a comprehensive piece of work - and, which, as the authors claim, is one of the first efforts to address this relationship - a large number of intersecting justice/development themes are covered. These include –

• why dealing with past abuses is important for development actors in pursuit of development goals - from the particular perspectives of the peacebuilding arena and the rights-based approach to development
  
• the economic legacies of authoritarianism — unproductive expenditures, undisciplined rent seeking, and macroeconomic destabilization — and their implications for democratization and transitional justice
  
• transitional justice and development: considering the ‘shared’ objective of facilitating systemic social transformation
  
• potential synergies between reparations programs and capabilities-based, bottom-up development efforts
  
• the links between judicial reform, development, and transitional justice measures, particularly criminal prosecutions.