This book explores the challenges of transitional justice in West Africa, specifically how countries in the region have dealt with transitional justice problems in the last 30 years (1990–2020), and how they have managed the process. Using comparative, historical, and legal analyses it examines the politics of justice after violent conflicts in West Africa, the major transitional justice mechanisms established in the region, and how countries have used these institutions to address injustice and the pains of war in some West African countries. The book examines how transitional justice mechanisms have contributed to victims’ rights, reconciliation, and peace in transitional societies, and whether transitional justice mechanisms deployed in West Africa were suitable or ill-fitted, and the politics of deploying them. The book is addressed to a wide audience: policymakers, and graduate and post-graduate students of transitional justice, conflict resolution, peace studies, conflict transformation, international criminal law, law and similar subjects. This book will be of great value to academics and researchers, as well as lecturers in tertiary institutions offering relevant courses; legal practitioners; peace practitioners/NGOs; and those working in the field of transitional justice and human rights.

This edited volume examines the role of local civil society in shaping understandings and processes of transitional justice in Africa – a nursery of transitional justice ideas for well over two decades. It brings together practitioners and scholars with intimate knowledge of these processes to evaluate the agendas and strategies of local civil society, and offers an opportunity to reflect on ‘lessons learnt’ along the way. The contributors focus on the evolution and effectiveness of transitional justice interventions, providing a glimpse into the motivations and inner workings of major civil society actors. The book presents an African perspective on transitional justice through a compilation of country-specific and thematic analyses of agenda setting and lobbying efforts. It offers insights into state–civil society relations on the continent, which shape these agendas. The chapters present case studies from Southern, Central, East, West and North Africa, and a range of moments and types of transition. In addition to historical perspective, the chapters provide fresh and up-to- date analyses of ongoing transitional justice efforts that are key to defining the future of how the field is understood globally, in theory and in practice Endorsements: "This great volume of written work – Advocating Transitional Justice in Africa: The Role of Civil Society – does what virtually no other labor of the intellect has done heretofore. Authored by movement activists and thinkers in the fields of human rights and transitional justice, the volume wrestles with the complex place and roles of transitional justice in the project of societal reconstruction in Africa. ... This volume will serve as a timely and thought-provoking guide for activists, thinkers, and policy makers – as well as students of transitional justice – interested in the tension between the universal and the particular in the arduous struggle for liberation. Often, civil society actors in Africa have been accused of consuming the ideas of others, but not producing enough, if any, of their own. This volume makes clear the spuriousness of this claim and firmly plants an African flag in the field of ideas." Makau Mutua

This book offers fresh insights on the `justice versus peace' dilemma, examining the challenges and prospects for promoting both peace and accountability, specifically in African countries affected by conflict or political violence. Peace versus Justice? draws on the expertise of many insider analysts, individuals who are not only authorities on transitional accountability processes, but who have participated in them, whether as legal practitioners or commissioners. This volume examines the wide array of experiences with transitional justice both within and outside states on the continent, spanning a range of countries including South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Mozambique, Sudan, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic. While the primary focus is on processes in Africa, many of the contributors also draw on lessons from earlier processes elsewhere in the world, particularly Latin America. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of approaches to accountability and peacebuilding. These include not only domestic courts and tribunals, hybrid tribunals, or the International Criminal Court, but also truth commissions and informal or non-state justice and conflict resolution processes. Taken together, they demonstrate the wealth of experiences and experimention in transitional justice processes on the continent.

Transition and Justice examines a series of cases from across the African continent where peaceful ‘new beginnings’ were declared after periods of violence and where transitional justice institutions helped define justice and the new socio-political order. Offers a new perspective on transition and justice in Africa transcending the institutional limits of transitional justice Covers a wide range of situations, and presents a broad range of sites where past injustices are addressed Examines cases where peaceful ‘new beginnings’ have been declared after periods of violence Addresses fundamental questions about transitions and justice in societies characterized by a high degree of external involvement and internal fragmentation

The volume offers a sweeping introduction to the politics of transition in the four principle nations in the African Great Lakes region.

It is almost axiomatic that transitional societies are usually faced with existential needs - redress of injustices, peace, and rebirth of social bearing. This has birthed transitional justice - a set of judicial and non-judicial measures aimed at redressing human rights abuses -which may include prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations, and such other transitional justice measures. Transitional justice is also about the desire to unearth the truths underpinning the injustices and creating a new paradigm of societal living - justice informed by truth. To fulfill these needs, legal ideas, and templates are readily borrowed - making transitional societies fertile grounds for legal transplants. Query - how well suited are these legal borrowings for the recipient society? What levels of critical scrutiny are given to basic social, economic and structural questions of the recipient normative order so as to ensure an effectual transplant? Post-Colonial Africa - West Africa - is a vast field of transitions. Legal Transplant of the transitional justice mechanism of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) has become quite common in the region. I argue that to understand the impact of the l transplant of TRCs, there is a need to understand the functions of TRCs - manifestly and otherwise. One way of doing this is to further interrogate TRCs with the comparative law theory of functionalism. This interrogation I argue, will yield not only 'the manifest and latent functions' of TRCs but also strengthen its transformative capacity. More so, the analytical and comparative evaluation of the TRCs seen in parts of West Africa - Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone - via legal transplant and functionalism, will help in sharpening TRCs are effective tools of transitional justice in ways that are not only economically transformative, but also social justice driven and capable of sustaining peace through human flourishing. It must be emphasized that the work seeks to infuse the TRC mechanism with a recipe of socioeconomic and political economic consciousness so that 'the felt necessities' of the communities - meaningful leaving, healing, food, education, shelter, access to clean water and capabilities; which often predisposes them to fragility - do not become the forgone alternative in transitional justice. Otherwise the TRC mechanism becomes merely grand gesture lacking in real impact on the wellbeing of transitional societies. In addition, the grand gestures about TRCs will continue to suffer the critique of producing modest results. In the end transitional societies want peace - a peace founded on truth, and justice - and I dare say that that economic justice is indispensable in that search. Economic justice is a legitimate expectation of transitional societies and this work inserts itself directly into the center of the ongoing scholarly debate about the impact of TRCs as mechanisms of transitional justice in the West African region. It does this using legal transplants and functionalism theories. It makes a case that economic and social justice should not be treated as forgone alternatives of transitional justice process but as cornerstones of the entire transitional justice architecture.

Considering the core debates about how to develop a transitional justice agenda that best responds to the African context, this book addresses the tension between justice, peace and reconciliation.

This book was inspired by the need of post-conflict societies to manage knowledge resources in such a way that it creates lasting restoration of durable peaceful relationships among people. It aims to demonstrate the challenges of the management of knowledge for restorative justice in Africa and the principles and practices by which these challenges can be met. To achieve this aim they applied what they call the 'Trans-dimensional Knowledge Management Model (TDKM-M)' to specific cases of restorative justice in South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Liberia. After an analysis of the cases studies, the author successfully demonstrated the challenges of the management of knowledge for restorative justice in Africa and the principles and practices by which these challenges can be met. The authors revealed common challenges to restorative justice such as establishing the 'truth'; the institutionalisation of recommendations by truth and reconciliation bodies; the handling of non-cooperative offenders; and replacing of 'good' values' with 'bad' values as major challenges to restorative justice. To meet these challenges, they propose certain principles of trans-dimensional restorative justice: the establishment of a 'trans-dimensional knowledge foundation' (not some version of 'the truth'); leadership in the implementation of strategies and plans; restoration or establishment of good relations among all people (not only the ruling elites); the identification of tacit and unseen factors that will determine successful restoration of these relationships; and changing these tacit and unseen factors.

The Era of Transitional Justice explores a broad set of issues raised by political transition and transitional justice through the prism of the South African TRC. South Africa constitutes a powerful case study of the enduring structural legacies of a troubled past, and of both the potential and limitations of transitional justice and human rights as agents of transformation in the contemporary era. South Africa‘s story has wider relevance because it helped to launch constitutional human rights and transitional justice as global discourses; as such, its own legacy is to some extent writ large in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts across the world. Based on a decade of research, and in an analysis that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, Paul Gready maintains that transitional justice needs to do more to address structural violence and in particular poverty, inequality and social and criminal violence as these have emerged as stubborn legacies from an oppressive or war-torn past in many parts of the world. Organised around four central themes new keyword conceptualisation (truth, justice, reconciliation); re-imagining human rights; engaging with the past and present; remaking the public sphere it is an argument that will be of considerable relevance to those interested in the law and politics of transitional societies.