Forgetting after war: A qualified defense

Philosophical scholarship on transitional justice has largely focused on adjudicating between retributive or restorative justice in post-conflict societies. Some scholars have begun to urge theorists of transitional justice to take into account the economic, cultural, and social realities of post-conflict nations. Transitional justice as structural justice focuses primarily on the political, social, and economic institutions that give rise to violence. Literature in transitional justice spans both theoretical and empirical realms. A great deal of work has been done on the empirical issues of transitional justice by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and journalists. Each transitional society is different and as such one could argue that the empirical study of particular nations is much more crucial to the process of transition than abstract theory. Theorizing about transitional justice apart from any particular cases of it can draw attention to common problems. Transitional justice as structural justice takes as its starting point an evaluation of the institutions that contributed to the original conflict.