Global Governance by Manual: The Transitional Justice Toolkit and the Standardization of a Field

Guidelines, manuals, and toolkits are a ubiquitous yet overlooked prop in contemporary global governance. Produced by regional and global organizations and NGOs to guide national policymakers and practitioners, they proliferate in every field of international regulation from democratization and education to accounting and health. Yet they are rarely analyzed or theorized as a phenomenon of global governance. This article approaches manuals and toolkits as a technology of international standardization, investigating the transitional justice (TJ) toolkit as an expression of the empirical phenomenon of global governance standardization. Through an in-depth content analysis of 30 instructional booklets, it demonstrates how the field of TJ is being standardized: The manuals “generify” TJ by constructing a generic, technical model; build the model’s authority and evidence base through exemplars and causal claims; and legitimize the model by stressing contextualization and portraying the national realm as fundamentally deficient and an object of capacity building. Thereby the manuals emphasize yet undermine the field’s central trope of rejecting one-size-fits-all solutions. This paradox of explicitly dismissing but implicitly imposing a universalizing model reflects a tension inherent in global order: between particularism and selfdetermination, on the one hand, and global goals and intervention on the other.