Transition and Justice: Negotiating the Terms of New Beginnings in Africa

Since the end of the Cold War, political new beginnings in Africa have increasingly been linked to questions of transitional justice. Since the establishment of the South African truth commission and the international tribunal in Arusha, the continent has been central in debates about how to deal with past injustices and achieve political transition. This book examines a series of cases where peaceful ‘new beginnings’ have been declared after periods of violence and where transitional justice institutions played a role in defining justice and the new socio–political order. Covering Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya, Sierra Leone and Mauritania, the book focuses on three issues that are key to understanding ‘new beginnings’: the problem of finding a foundation for that which explicitly breaks with the past; the discrepancies between lofty promises and the chaotic realities of transitional justice in action; and the dialectic between logics of the exception and the ordinary, employed to legitimize or resist transitional justice mechanisms. With contributions from an international array of leading scholars, from South Africa, Europe, USA and Canada, this timely publication is invaluable in understanding the many complex issues associated with transitional justice in Africa.

Gerhard Anders is lecturer at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. He is co–editor of Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal Anthropological Perspective (2007) and author of In the Shadow of Good Governance: An Ethnography of Civil Service Reform in Africa (2010). Olaf Zenker is Ambizione Research Fellow (SNSF) at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern. He is the author of Irish/ness Is All Around Us: Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland (2013) and co–editor of The State and the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa (2014).