Race and Transitional Justice

Abstract Rightly or wrongly, transitional justice discourse, scholarship, and practice have emerged as the site for addressing gross and systematic injustices of the past with a view to transitioning to a more righteous future. Until recently, however, transitional justice has had a blind spot when it comes to addressing some of the greatest injustices of human history: racism and the colonialism and slave trade that both reflected and fuelled it. This book grapples with the question of why this is the case and how it could be different. Through centring race as a lens to interrogate transitional justice praxis and theory, this book joins the nascent corrective projects underway seeking to generate fresh insights into how race and racism come to inhabit the nooks and crannies of transitional justice institutions and mechanisms and to imagine emancipatory transitional justice futures. The contributions in this volume show that even though race is an important aspect of the historical and socio-political contexts in which transitional justice mechanisms work and of many of the violations that they are designed to address, transitional justice as a field has a poor sensitivity to the concept of race. As a result, transitional justice institutions may be sustaining the very racialization that they could be expected to remedy. The authors vary in their hopes for redemption. Some call to abandon the whole field because of its complicity in the indefinite maintenance of settler hegemony. Others consider transitional justice as an essential space to work towards a more just, non-racist, social order.