The Hidden Costs of Terror

In this month’s featured article, former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo (2001-2006) gives a thoughtful and insightful account of how post-atrocity accounting and reconstruction feels ‘from the top’. What can an incoming head of state possibly do or say that will redress and repair the social and human costs of decades of violence? What about the centuries of injustice and inequality that fueled the flames? In fact Toledo did perhaps as much as he could, and more than many thought he would be able to, in recognising and beginning to address the ethnic, class, and institutional faultlines that tore Peru apart between 1980 and 2000

Advancing the Criminal Justice Pillar of Transitional Justice in Challenging Contexts::Preconditions for successful criminal justice

A distinctive characteristic of transitional justice is to seek mutually reinforcing advances across each of its dimensions: truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition, considering which course(s) of action can contribute to the greatest forward movement overall, while avoiding possible backsliding. This interdependence means that justice cannot be treated as an agenda to be pursued separately from truth, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition, which may influence how justice decisions need to be defined, viewed and implemented.This document, which was prepared on request to inform considerations for review of the UN Secretary General's Guidance Note on TJ, focuses on preconditions and initial considerations regarding criminal justice in domestic accountability spaces. The paper contends that narrow “norm transfer” approaches are unlikely to succeed, with detailed country diagnostics needed to craft workable, locally grounded appreciations of how the best interests of justice can be served in a particular setting at a given tim

The Female Entrepreneur ?

I read the “Women’s Crusade” article that forms the centrepiece of this month’s roundtable with initial interest, gradually turning to a vague sense of disquiet spiced with occasional disbelief. After a few more readings, I tried highlighting the passages that bothered me and stringing them together. Countries “riven by fundamentalism”— that’s presumably the Islamic variety, rather than the Christian variant which holds such sway in the US. The suggestion that “everyone from the World Bank to the US [...] Chiefs of Staff to [...] CARE” now thinks that women are the answer to global extremism hides too many questionable assumptions to list: for now, I’ll stick with the one that implies those three actors complete the fullest possible range of alternative views

Hope over Experience?

Writing about US human rights policy from the outside is always a disconcerting experience. All bets are off, and all assumptions are turned on their head. Assumptions from the South looking North are that, rhetoric aside, US interests rarely if ever feature human rights protection and promotion in first place. What’s more, they have very frequently featured the opposite: dirty tricks, torture and rendition were sadly familiar to students of Latin American history long before Guantanamo. The Clinton years went some way towards reining in the more blatant contradictions of the 1980s, but they also set in train the easy and often misused equation between US style democracy and rights that paved the way for “preventive” regime change under Bush. US invocations of freedom have always, in other words, been selective even within its shores and often seem quite irreconcilable with the reality of its actions beyond them