The Nexus between Transitional Justice and International Norms

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In the last two decades there has been a close relationship between empirical and theoretical advances in scholarship on transitional justice and theoretical and conceptual developments in the study of international norms. For international norms scholars, the various transitional justice practices (e.g., trials, truth and reconciliation commissions, reparations, memorialization) and their worldwide diffusion have offered fruitful empirical grounds for developing and testing hypotheses and mechanisms about the emergence, spread, and impact of international norms. More recently, studies of responses to and variations in normative expectations related to legal accountability and truth-seeking have advanced understandings of processes of norm contestation and localization and begun to fill gaps in our knowledge of the politics of norm contestation, compliance, and violation. Likewise, the framework of international norms has furnished transitional justice scholars with concepts and models that help explain the international incentives and constraints that shape states’ choices for “dealing with the past.” Against this backdrop, this panel brings together a set of scholars and papers that builds on and investigates empirical and theoretical aspects of this interrelationship. In so doing, the papers uncover the multiple ways in which transitional justice has shaped and informed approaches to international norms and vice versa.

Sub Unit

• Division 43: International History and Politics

Cosponsor

• Division 60: International Relations Theory

Individual Presentations

• Agents of Deterrence: The Baltic Politics of Post-war Accountability for Russia - Maria Mälksoo, University of Copenhagen

• The International Normative Framework of Looted Art Restitution - Jelena Subotic, Georgia State University

• Beyond Stones and Statues: Unraveling the Norm of Memorialization - Stephanie Wolfe, Weber State University

• State of Repair: Content and Strength of the International Norm of Reparations - Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch, Suffolk University; Jennifer M. Dixon, Villanova University

Chair

• David Mendeloff Carleton University

Discussant

• David Mendeloff Carleton University