Review Symposium Response

Abstract

It is a great honor and pleasure to have my book as the subject of this review symposium and to benefit from the extremely thoughtful remarks of the group of scholars included here, each a major author on the theme of transitional justice. Each scholar brings a wealth of research and experience to the subject from a diverse perspective. The comments are too rich and varied for me to do justice to all of them in my response, but I hope to address some of the major points of each reviewer. In particular, I will address issues about (1) the policy scope of the book, (2) methods of comparison, (3) data concerns, and (4) processes of historical change. First, on policy scope, Bronwyn Anne Leebaw points out correctly that I do not intend the book to be a history or analysis of the entire field of transitional justice, but rather a comprehensive but focused account of a central transitional justice mechanism—prosecutions for individual criminal accountability. To do a history of the emergence and spread of this single transitional justice mechanism, as well as a systematic analysis of its effectiveness, was already a huge challenge. As Leslie Vinjamuri notes, I do not argue that prosecutions are more or less popular or effective than other transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions, reparations, or amnesties. Leebaw persuasively reminds us that activists themselves have had long and continuing debates about the role and limits of legalism, something she has explored eloquently in her own work.1 These debates about the limits of legalism were often couched as debates about the advantages of alternative transitional justice mechanisms. While I did not make these debates a central focus on the book, I try to address them at times. Since it is impossible to present in the book even a fraction of the number of those who worked for accountability, the stories of a few actors stand in for the countless individuals and groups who work for justice. Thus I present skeptical arguments about justice by respected colleagues and friends like José Zalaquett or Ellen Lutz, in the