The Standardisation of Transitional Justice

This article argues that transitional justice (TJ) has recently been standardised: There is now a two-tiered global standard of TJ which structures policy responses and academic thinking. TJ comprises criminal justice, truth-telling, reparations and institutional reform – four core elements in a ‘comprehensive’ design. The standard involves best practice, specifications for design and procedure, and a selection of seemingly unambiguous international legal norms. Building on existing research on international standardisation as an international political and sociological phenomenon, the article analyses the recently developed TJ standard and presents the first account of the process of TJ standardisation. It demonstrates how processes of ‘generification’, ‘localisation’ and ‘expansion’ make practices transferable and establish the means to facilitate their replication in and across different contexts and settings.