Monograph
Governing Truth: NGOs and the Politics of Transitional Justice
Under contract with Oxford University Press
*Based on my Ph.D. dissertation, which won Best Dissertation in Human Rights from the American Political Science Association and the Lynne Rienner Publishers Award for Best Dissertation in Human Rights from the International Studies Association in 2022. An earlier version of Chapter 5 won the Lawrence S. Finkelstein Prize in International Organization from the International Studies Association in 2021.
Who governs transitional justice? Transitional justice (TJ) is the global regime to deliver truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition after political violence. Existing research tends to depict TJ as a set of government-led institutions, suggesting that the adoption, design, and implementation of TJ mechanisms are primarily, if not exclusively, shaped by governments. Previous scholarship also casts TJ as a set of domestic accountability tools encompassing truth commissions, memorials, trials, compensation programs, and institutional reforms. Yet governments are not the parties most interested in TJ; victims and their families are. And TJ is not only local; it is also global. It is a set of norms and practices that have been developed, refined, institutionalized, and promoted by an international community of experts and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) representing the interests of victims and their families. This duality, between victims and governments and between the local and the global, sets the stage for my book, Governing Truth: NGOs and the Politics of Transitional Justice.
I argue that TJ is not a set of domestic, government-led processes. Rather, TJ is a transnational, civil society-led institution; it arises from domestic civil society groups’ influence on governments from below and international civil society groups’ influence on governments from above. Composing a global TJ network, these groups give governments the impetus to adopt TJ institutions, design them to succeed, and follow up on them with additional measures. The network’s influence is based in members’ advocacy, technical expertise, and operational assistance to governments. Network members burden share, exercising their comparative advantages – in information, experience, material resources, and political power – to maximize scarce resources. And they alternate leadership and support roles at different stages to enhance their chances of success. The book thus produces a new model of transnational advocacy networks, the burden sharing model. This model goes beyond policy advocacy, which has been the focus of the extant literature, and brings attention to civil society’s essential role in policy design, delivery, and follow-up. To be sure, the TJ network’s success is not inevitable or guaranteed. And there is variation in practice – domestic and international groups do not always collaborate as described. Rather, their success, I argue and the empirical findings show, depends on whether or not they do.
I demonstrate my argument through careful cross-national and cross-case analyses of the TJ life cycle: institutional adoption, design, delivery and follow-up. I focus the inquiry on truth commissions, as they often precede and provide the normative and evidentiary basis for prosecutions, reparations programs, memorialization projects, and reforms. In this vein, the book presents evidence from statistical analyses of the novel Varieties of Truth Commissions Project, a series of datasets that I built over a period of three years with seventeen research assistants at two universities. The datasets capture for the first time (1) the universe of truth commissions, (2) their mandates and investigative powers, (3) their recommendations, and (4) levels of implementation across recommendations. I also produce case studies and probe causal pathways using evidence from my fieldwork, including interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders based in Argentina, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Indonesia, Kenya, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Timor-Leste, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Edited Collections
Innovations in Human Rights: Concepts, Data, and Measurement (co-edited with Francesca Parente). Under contract, Edward Elgar Publishing.
“Human rights respect,” “compliance with international law,” “design and implementation of transitional justice” — these are challenging concepts to measure systematically. But understanding them has never been more needed in our world. This edited volume showcases new efforts in data acquisition and analysis of rarely, if ever, quantified concepts, which are joined and strengthened by qualitative evidence from fieldwork and archives. Strong measurement is driven by substance, not methods. Accordingly, contributors have carefully considered what concepts they want to capture, substantively, and then undertaken intensive data collection, resulting in new measures and datasets. Contributors present insightful data of various types in descriptive and analytical studies, showing us the world as it is and highlighting puzzles and questions to move forward with.
"A History of Norms Research in International Relations" (section co-edited with Wayne Sandholtz). In Orchard, Phil, Antje Wiener, and Sassan Gholiagha (Editors). The Oxford Handbook on Norms Research in International Relations. Under contract, Oxford University Press.
Research on the origins, functioning, effects, and evolution of international norms has expanded dramatically over the past 25 years. This section assesses that development, asking contributors to revisit key works in light of subsequent advances in theory and empirical research. An early insight of this body of research was that the norms that guide behaviour in international relations emerge and develop through processes of social interaction and contestation. A first generation of contributions established that norms have identifiable effects on behaviour, shaping the policy horizons of governing elites as well as the policy demands of a broader range of political and social actors. Subsequent work has built on these fundamental insights. Research has since shown that norms establish a range of acceptable behaviours and that actors constantly seek to shift that range. Some actors—activists, NGOs, international courts, leading states—work to shrink that range, whereas others attempt to expand it. Norms scholarship has also focused on actors, exploring how they reason about norms and how international norms can reshape how they define their interests. Norm conflict has also emerged as a focus of research, examining how, in a world of multiple overlapping systems of norms, actors deal with norms that are in tension with each other. Research has addressed the dynamics of norm change, recognising that many international norms are in a state of constant flux, as actors seek to apply norms to new kinds of problems or seek to shift the interpretation of norms. The selection of key works is organised around these leading questions that have guided norms research and contributed to its emergence as an important subfield in international relations.
International Journal of Transitional Justice 2025 Special Issue: The Afterlives of Transitional Justice (co-edited with Francesca Parente). Forthcoming.
While the 20th century witnessed the fall of non-democratic governments around the world, the first three decades of the 21st century have been rife with examples of authoritarianism on the rise. Inter-governmental organizations like the United Nations and the European Union are likewise targets of populist backlash, hindering their ability to enforce international human rights laws and principles. Seeming international consensus supportive of societal reckoning with the past, including states that subscribed to this program, is also eroding. Moreover, governments around the world are impeding the work of domestic, international, and transnational advocacy groups crucial to transitional justice. Leveraging both physical repression and administrative crackdown, governments are making it harder for groups to mobilize for redress. This special issue responds to two broad questions: In what ways and to what extent do current political developments affect judgments about the success of past transitional justice processes? And what are the implications of rising authoritarianism, populist backlash, and geopolitical and economic realignments for transitional justice in the 21st century?