Transitional Justice

The Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials are fairly well- known and intensely researched cases of transitional justice, but after the Cold War, many other administrative and juridical procedures were introduced all over the world in order to assist regime change or secure transition processes.

International and Internationalized Criminal Tribunals are a special variant of transitional justice. They re-emerged at the beginning of the nineties with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as ad hoc tribunals and the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a permanent institution adjudicating cases of genocide, war crimes, grave breeches of the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity. Since then, other forms of transitional justice have been established, like the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Cambodia Tribunal and the International Chambers in Kosovo.

In our Transitional Justice Program, we focus on international and internationalized tribunals, but we do not neglect restorative forms of transitional justice, like truth and reconciliation commissions (like in Sierra Leone and South Africa), because the overarching question our program tries to answer, is: which forms of transitional justice are the most efficient ways to reconciliation between former enemy groups. Therefore, our objective is also to provide a concise and measurable definition and understanding of reconciliation, beyond the rather vague and often contradictory notions used by the media, politicians and lawyers.

The program is interdisciplinary and engages political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, historians and social psychologists, but we also welcome contributions from other disciplines.