This chapter sets out to unpack a number of assumptions and principles on which the mainstream transitional justice approach (normal model) is based. It gives particular attention to Pablo de Greiff’s ‘normative conception of transitional justice’, which provides an important backdrop against which my pluralist reading unfolds in the subsequent chapters. Moreover, this chapter places the book’s argument in relation to larger ongoing critical debates within the field.

This chapter explores the place of compromise in transitional justice. While all-pervasive in politics, compromise is a neglected topic, almost a non-topic, within the current transitional justice literature. The chapter is an attempt to reverse this tendency and rehabilitate the notion of compromise. If, as pluralists hold, we are often faced with cases of hard moral choices where, whatever we do, something of value is irreparably lost, then the best we can hope for is some kind of acceptable compromise between clashing goods. The question about the limits of compromise thus features centrally in this chapter. How far should transitional societies go in their willingness to compromise? When is a compromise acceptable, fair, guided by principle, and when is it rotten to the core, simply illegitimate? To what extent is it acceptable to compromise deeply held values such as justice and truth for the sake of other equally important values such as, say, civil peace and democracy? While doubtful that we can settle such issues once and for all, the chapter identifies a range of questions that should be part of the collective conversation about when a political compromise is acceptable and when it is not. The discussion begins, however, with a concrete historical figure, the communist leader Joe Slovo, who played a critical role in South Africa’s negotiated transition from apartheid to democracy. Slovo’s reflections on the nature and limits of compromise in the South African context serve as a central reference point for my discussion throughout this chapter.

This chapter discusses the place of conflict in transitional justice. Building on a range of historical real-life examples, it argues that conflict is an important rather than incidental part of many, if not all, transitional justice processes. The chapter initially focuses on value conflicts and then turns to conflicts of interests (political power, offices, money, etc.). Drawing on recent realist work in political theory, the chapter argues that it is time to give politics its due and idealisation a rest in transitional justice. This is not an argument against ideals, but against an approach that is idealistic in the wrong sense, in such a way as to suppress, erase from view, real experiences of conflict. Towards the end, the chapter explores recent attempts in the transitional justice literature to take conflict more seriously, particularly Christine Bell’s account of transitional justice as bargaining.

There is a memorable line by ancient Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Drawing on this metaphor made popular by Isaiah Berlin, this book sets out to ‘think like a fox’ about transitional justice in an intellectual environment largely dominated by hedgehogs. Critical of the unitary ‘hedgehog-like’ vision underlying mainstream discourse, this book proposes a pluralist reading of the field. It asks what it would mean for transitional justice to constructively deal with conflicts of values and interests in societies grappling with a violent past. And what would it mean to make meaningful room for diversity, to see ‘the many’ rather than just ‘the one’?

There is a memorable line by ancient Greek poet Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Drawing on this metaphor made popular by Isaiah Berlin, this book sets out to ‘think like a fox’ about transitional justice in an intellectual environment largely dominated by hedgehogs. Critical of the unitary ‘hedgehog-like’ vision underlying mainstream discourse, this book proposes a pluralist reading of the field. It asks what it would mean for transitional justice to constructively deal with conflicts of values and interests in societies grappling with a violent past. And what would it mean to make meaningful room for diversity, to see ‘the many’ rather than just ‘the one’?

This chapter offers a pluralist reading of transitional justice built around three meanings of pluralism. The first is value pluralism – the idea, dear to Isaiah Berlin, that values are irreducibly manifold, potential conflicting and frequently incommensurable in such a way that they cannot be ranked or weighed on any single scale. The second meaning of pluralism is cultural pluralism. It refers to the fact that there are many different cultures, many different collective ways of life, none of which can claim superiority. While insisting on the possibility of a cross-cultural conversation around core values, the proposed pluralist approach rejects the normal model’s tendency to reduce transitional justice to one set of (Western) cultural forms. The third form of pluralism briefly considered is legal pluralism, meaning the coexistence of competing legal orders. Discussing Rwanda’s experience with the so-called gacaca courts, the chapter suggests a pluralist understanding of the rule of law flexible enough to accommodate cultural variation while remaining committed to what I take to be its universal core. The chapter ends by proposing a pluralist method for thinking about transitional justice, which is linked to basic commitments referred to as sense of reality, anti-monism, situated thinking, decolonised cosmopolitanism and fallibilistic mentality. The chapter argues that these commitments can help mitigate a number of problematic trends in contemporary transitional justice discourse and practice.

INTRODUCTION

Turning a blind eye, looking the other way, averting your gaze, wearing blinkers, living a lie, burying your head in the sand, putting a gloss on the truth. These are some of the expressions and phrases that are commonly used to describe the concept of denial. As individuals, we can be said to ‘live in denial’ when we avoid focusing our attention on information that is too disturbing, unsettling or shameful to be faced and openly acknowledged. The political echoes of these states of mind may be found in official defence mechanisms (‘It didn't happen’, ‘What happened is not what it looks like’, ‘It was an isolated incident’, ‘We had no idea that this was happening’, ‘They brought it on themselves really’, ‘Anyway it was justified’) through which entire societies try to conceal, suppress or dissociate themselves from a record of past atrocities. If such denials of past horrors are initiated by the state, or built into its ideological facade, few would doubt that something wrong is being done. This sort of official denial is immoral, because it involves treating the victims of those wrongs as if they simply did not matter, as if they were politically and morally negligible – an attitude that is disrespectful in its very essence.

The opposite of denial is acknowledgement. To deny that something once happened is to fail to acknowledge that it did happen. This distinction between denial and acknowledgement may look simple enough, but it becomes blurred when one considers the varieties of denial or gradations of acknowledgment (half-truth, evasions, legalistic sophistries and so on) that may appear in official discourse in the Aftermath of collective violence. So what exactly does it mean for a society to ‘acknowledge’ its record of public and political atrocities? And how can this acknowledgement be transformed into action? Part of the answer to these questions will depend on “the nature of the previous regime, its residual power, how the transition happened, and the character of the new society” (Cohen 2001, 222).