While we often scrutinize transitional justice (TJ) mechanisms, projects, and outcomes, we infrequently see the interactions across time and between actors that lead to choices ultimately supporting or sidelining particular approaches, harms, and groups over others, as well as how these interactions change and what new processes those changes set off. Christalla Yakinthou therefore examines the book’s case studies using a framework guided by the concept of ‘friction’. Yakinthou draws out resonant themes to TJ from anthropologist Anna Tsing’s work. From these, she sets four frames: engaged universals and travelling packages; purification of conceptual and historical spaces; gatekeepers and the illusion of universals; and collaborations, shifts, and (co)imagining the universal ideal. In the second part of the chapter, she applies them to the data that has emerged from the case studies, to understand how and why goals or institutions were pursued, redirected, and abandoned. The frames direct us towards how hierarchies of power were created and recreated and the consequences of such re/creations. The four frames show that while there may be universally understood principles attached to TJ, the interaction between the universals as fixed concepts and their interpretation in the five case studies have created gaps, mutations, and innovations that have been sometimes constructive, and sometimes destructive. These interactions change our understanding of the “rules” of TJ, as they also change the routes through which civil society and donor actors try to reach their goals. The indicators together show us how these interactions create shifts, fractures, limitations, new gaps, and also, importantly, new opportunities across the spectrum of actors engaged in the pursuit of TJ and the ideas that result. They give us important clues as to how to create more integrated, inclusive, and strategic TJ engagements.