In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Use of Force

17 Sep

[Arnaud Kurze is an Associate Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University.] Introduction “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have,” James Baldwin wrote in No Name in the Street over half a century ago, describing his childhood memories in Harlem and events that painstakingly scarred his memory, including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X’s deaths (Baldwin...

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17 Sep

[Iavor Rangelov is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Chair of the Board of Governors of the Humanitarian Law Center, Belgrade.] The publication of Ruti Teitel’s Transitional Justice coincided with the emergence of the former Yugoslavia from a decade of war and repression that had transformed the region’s social and political landscape. The hostilities and...

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16 Sep

[Danielle Celermajer is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney.] When Transitional Justice was published twenty years ago, its principal and most explicit contribution was its incisive articulation of a sophisticated theoretical framework for a range of real-world institutional innovations that had emerged as nations around the world were seeking to grapple with their violent pasts. There was already at...

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16 Sep

[Manal Totry-Jubran is an Assistant Professor of Law at Bar Ilan University.] Transitional Justice opened a new window of opportunity to better understand the scope of concepts such as “Political Transition,” “Justice,” “Law,” and ”Liberal Democracies,” and how these interconnect in times of political change. In it, Teitel revealed the constructive and extraordinary role that the law and legal responses play in times of political transition. Suggesting...

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16 Sep

[Tatiana Waisberg is an international  Law  lecturer, researcher and author of books and articles focusing on International Law, Transitional Justice, Latin America Studies, Terrorism and Human Rights, and a ZviMeitar Center for Legal Advanced Studies Research Fellow (20050-8).] This symposium offers an excellent opportunity to reflect on the transitional justice phenomenology over the two decades that followed the launch of...

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16 Sep

[Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is a Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and the Queen’s University of  Belfast School of Law and since 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism.] Among the many titles and honorifics she holds Ruti Teitel should be given another – namely, that of undisputed matriarch of the transitional justice...

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15 Sep

[Frank Haldemann is Co-Director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Transitional Justice, Human Rights and the Rule of Law at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.] I first met Ruti in 2006, when I was a Hauser Global Research Fellow at the New York University of Law. For many of us working on transitional justice in these still early days, Ruti’s book Transitional Justice...

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15 Sep

[Francisco-José Quintana is a PhD candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge.] International law scholarship ages unevenly. It is a rich and —for the willing— diverse field, which makes diving into libraries and archives an exciting journey that might take one to a variety of teachings, preoccupations, approaches, and destinations. We might not, however, find everything quite exciting, and time has been...

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14 Sep

[Colleen Murphy is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.] Ruti Teitel’s 2000 book, Transitional Justice,was and remains agenda-setting for scholars working in normative theory.  In this post I explain why and some of the ongoing debates whose origin can be traced to her work. Normative theories of justice specify what...

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14 Sep

[Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School; and a Visiting Fellow, London School of Economics and the author of Transitional Justice (OUP, 2000).] As one enters the main building of Humboldt University in Berlin, one finds a famed quotation from Karl Marx, which has survived the post-Communist transition: “The philosophers have only interpreted...

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14 Sep

This week we are hosting another great online symposium, this time on the 20th anniversary of Ruti Teitel's seminal book, Transitional Justice, (OUP, 2000). The book's abstract: At the century's end, societies all over the world are moving from authoritarian rule to democracy. At any such time of radical change, the question arises: should a society punish its ancien regime or let bygones by...

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