THEORIZING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

Abstract

Transitional justice has been defined as a process of addressing gross human rights violations and encouraging democratic transitions. It embraces the mechanisms of prosecutions, truth-telling, reparations, institutional reforms, vetting and memorialization. The evolution of the concept has widened with democratic transitions and the developing theoretical contributions. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the theoretical discussion made on the concept of transitional justice. The relevant data has been gathered through journal articles, books, reports and other academic publications. The analysis has been done under content analysis, and it is a qualitative data analysis. The results and findings of the study depict that transformation justice theory aims at legal, psychological, socio-economic and political justice to foster the mechanisms of transitional justice. The social learning theory directly deals with repairing former relationships and socioeconomic concerns, avoiding unequal treatment. The justice continuum theory of transitional justice interacts with justice and reparations in building a combined process of reparation justice, restorative justice, civic justice and socio-economic justice.