A Political Conception of Transitional Justice

Transitions affect our framework of familiarity and predictability. For example, the climate transition may frustrate our current expectations concerning energy consumption, mobility, and housing. Moreover, transitions might frustrate our expectation of not being disadvantaged retroactively. Arguably, in allocating the remaining carbon budget fairness requires accounting for our past emissions and the benefits realized from emission-generating activities. For these reasons, conflicts are likely to emerge regarding how we should address this transformation. Considering these conflicts from the perspective of transitional justice requires evaluating them in terms of the path that we should follow to transform the status quo. In the 20th century, transitional justice was conceptualised in terms of the transitions from regimes that supported, or did not hinder, egregious human rights violations to democratic governments under the rule of law. Often referred to as transitions to democracy, prominent examples include post-WW II Germany and post-apartheid South Africa. The global transformation to a low-carbon society does not seem to fall into the category of transitions to democracy as it is not concerned with alleviating flagrant violations of human rights. Rather it aims at securing conditions of justice for future generations and at avoiding seriously harmful impacts of climate change. By their emission-generating activities as such, people did not engage in human rights violations, at least so long as they were not liable to know about the long-term effects of their cumulative emissions. This project argues that transitional justice should and can guide us in a new generation of transitions. As a normative practice, we can conceptualise transitional justice by the role it plays in the public domain. At the same time, its historical roots require examining the sources of political and philosophical controversy during historical transitions. The project will investigate the hypothesis that the role of transitional justice is to adjudicate the conflict between peoples historically formed legitimate expectations and expectations that emerge during or because of the transition process. The project aims to demonstrate that this conflict was at stake in earlier transitions to democracy, and that it is now at stake in a new generation of transitions. Why should we consider both the historical and the new generation of transitions as part of the same practice? As a consequence of past transitions, societies have inherited a narrative about past political tragedies through collective memory. They have also inherited moral knowledge about transitioning but less focus has been devoted to examining this. A political conception of transitional justice might not only be a conceptual but also a discursive tool capable of triggering a collective know-how memory for identifying the just path for bringing about a transformation to a just future.