Designing for Context: Pragmatic Transitional Justice and the Independent Institution on Missing Persons on the Syrian Arab Republic

The global project of transitional justice (TJ) assumes that states are partners in justice processes. Yet, the TJ framework has been increasingly promoted in contexts of authoritarianism and ongoing conflict, where political actors are often hostile to justice initiatives. TJ scholarship has noted the expansion of the field to these contexts and is exploring how this contextual hostility to justice is incorporated into specific TJ processes. This article contributes to this literature by studying the Independent Institution on Missing Persons on the Syrian Arab Republic (IIMP), created in 2023, before the fall of the Assad regime, when the prospects of a political transition were far from certain. It demonstrates that the tension between state hostility and a demand for justice was central to the development of the IIMP and argues that creating the IIMP became a viable policy option once the temporalities and functional possibilities of the TJ catalogue became pragmatically separated. The solution was created in contrast to the idealism that permeates the field’s grand theories of change. The article explores how contextualization and legalization contributed to the conditions of possibility for the IIMP, and reflects on the dilemma of contextualizing TJ.