{"id":13821,"date":"2022-12-15T10:46:18","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T08:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/?p=13821"},"modified":"2023-01-06T15:19:46","modified_gmt":"2023-01-06T13:19:46","slug":"from-dictatorships-to-terrorism-how-to-end-the-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencespo.fr\/research\/cogito\/home\/from-dictatorships-to-terrorism-how-to-end-the-violence\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"From Dictatorships to Terrorism, How to End the Violence?"},"content":{"rendered":"

South Africa, former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, post-communist Eastern Europe, post-dictatorship Latin America \u2026: since the 1990s, many countries have had to negotiate a transition from violent internal conflicts to often democratic peace. In her latest book\u00a0Comment sortir de la violence ? Enjeux et limites de la justice transitionnelle<\/i><\/a> (How to end the violence? Stakes and limits of transitional justice<\/i>, CNRS Editions, April 2022), Sandrine Lefranc, CNRS research director at the Centre for European and Comparative Studies, examines \u2018transitional justice\u2019 initiatives by questioning their assumptions, implementation, and results. Interview.<\/p>\n

What is transitional justice and when did it appear?<\/h4>\n

Sandrine Lefranc: The expression \u2018transitional justice\u2019 encompasses a set of proposals and measures aiming to establish peace and reconciliation after mass violence (genocide, civil wars, dictatorial repression). Symbolic measures are favoured: establishing the truth about what happened, identifying the perpetrators and the victims, repairing the damage, reforming criminal states, developing a remembrance policy, and reconciling societies. Proponents of this idea\u2009\u2013\u2009human rights activists, academics, government actors, and international organisations\u2009\u2013\u2009seek to interlink all these measures into a coherent policy.
\nTransitional justice emerged at the end of the Cold War, as dictatorships gave way to democratically elected governments. These changes were not clean breaks. Rather, they built on compromises with the existing regimes. When you negotiate democratisation with a dictator supported by an army, it is difficult to send him to prison! Transitional justice must enable social peace and consolidation of the young democratic regime, and too bad if ties to the former regime remain strong. Transitional justice is therefore a negotiated justice that tries to reconcile these concessions with victim expectations by recognising the crimes but most often without punishing them, since the new judicial institutions remain subject to political compromise. While the development of international criminal justice has enabled prosecution of some high-level officials, this only covers a small number of the perpetrators of abuse.<\/p>\n

If the criminals are not necessarily punished, what concrete measures have been put in place to restore peace and turn the page on painful conflicts while preserving their memory?<\/h4>\n
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Peacekeepers Rwanda Make Peace: Promote unity and reconciliation. Cr\u00e9dit photo : Dave Proffer. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

S.L.\u00a0: Political criminals are generally not criminally punished, but Rwanda is a notable exception. The military-led government that won the war and ended the Tutsi genocide in 1994 succeeded in imposing a form of maximal justice by prosecuting nearly two million participants in the genocide. Rather than transitional justice, which primarily addresses situations without winners or losers, it is a form of victor\u2019s justice, like the one we experienced after World War\u00a0II.<\/p>\n

Going back to transitional justice, its most emblematic feature is the truth and reconciliation commission [originally called the truth commission], which has been implemented in more than fifty countries, from post-dictatorship Latin America to the United States addressing the past of the civil rights movement(1)<\/sup><\/a>I am thinking in particular of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up in the city of Greensboro. It was created in 2006 at the initiative of a citizen’s movement, and its purpose was the murder of five activists by the Ku Klux Klan during a rally. To learn more: Am\u00e9rique latine et reste du monde les voyages internationaux de la \u00ab justice transitionnelle , Sandrine Lefranc, in Revue des droits d<\/i><\/a>e<\/i> l’homme<\/i><\/a>, 2012<\/i><\/span><\/span>