Bronwyn Leebaw

The Irreconcilable Goals of Transitional Justice

The goals of transitional justice advocacy and institutions are commonly portrayed as mutually reinforcing and complementary. This article argues that in evaluating the political significance of transitional justice, more attention should be given to their irreconcilable goals. This analysis is informed by the work of legal scholars and political theorists that have drawn attention to the dual role of law in relation to violence. While law can be a tool for regulating violence and exposing abuses of power, law is also utilized to obfuscate and legitimate abuses of power. Similarly, transitional justice institutions aim to challenge the legitimacy of prior political practices by confronting denial and transforming the terms of debate on past abuses, yet they also seek to establish their own legitimacy by minimizing the challenge that they pose to dominant frameworks for interpreting the past. This article demonstrates how a better understanding of this tension sheds light on problematic assumptions and unacknowledged trade-offs associated with the claims regarding the role of transitional justice institutions in advancing political reconciliation through measures designed to counter denial, expand dialogue, and address trauma. It concludes by discussing the implications of the analysis for transitional justice policy as well as debates on the general significance of expanding transitional justice advocacy.

The Politics of Impartial Activism: Humanitarianism and Human Rights

Humanitarian and human rights movements have gained influence as impartial ethical responses to injustice and suffering, yet their claims to impartiality are commonly dismissed as misleading, naive, or counterproductive. To date, little attention has been paid to the very different ways human rights and humanitarian movements have conceptualized impartiality in relation to distinct and conflicting activist goals.Bronwyn Leebaw is Assistant Professor of Political Science, UC Riverside (Bronwyn.leebaw@ucr.edu). The author is grateful to Hanna Pitkin, Lisa Disch, John Cioffi, Mark Reinhardt, Jennifer Hochschild, and three insightful anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. In developing ideas for this article, she also benefited from conversations with Helen Kinsella, Mark Drumbl, Chandra Sriram, Eric Stover, Harvey Weinstein, Lon Troyer, Kateri Carmola, David Pion-Berlin, Chris Laursen, John Medearis, Juliann Allison, Victor Peskin, Ruti Teitel, Targol Mesbah, Helen Lennon, Tom Reifer, Dean Mathiowetz, and the graduate students at UC Riverside.

Scorched Earth: Environmental War Crimes and International Justice

Environmental devastation is not only a byproduct of war, but has also been a military strategy since ancient times. How have the norms and laws of war addressed the damage that war inflicts on the environment? How should “environmental war crimes” be defined and addressed? I address these questions by critically examining the way that distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate wartime environmental destruction have been drawn in debates on just war theory and the laws of war. I identify four distinctive formulations for framing the wartime significance of nature that appear in such debates and analyze how each is associated with distinctive claims regarding what constitutes “humaneness” in times of war: nature as property; nature as combatant; nature as Pandoras Box; and nature as victim. I argue that efforts to investigate and judge the environmental impact of war destabilize and expose the limitations of core distinctions that animate humanitarian norms, but also offer an important and neglected source of guidance in addressing those limitations.

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? (review)

global political economy from several critical perspectives. It contributes to an important ongoing dialogue about human rights responsibilities in an interconnected world and the need for clarity about the obligations of all actors. However, the legal reality still indicates that in relation to IFIs, the EU, or private sector actors, we are still not dealing with “new dutybearers” as much as with evolving international institutional structures through which “old duty-bearers” (i.e., states) must acknowledge their extended and extraterritorial human rights obligations.

Justice and the faithless: The demand for disobedience in international criminal law:

How is disobedience required under international criminal law? How do war crimes trials demand and seek to cultivate disobedience as a response to atrocity? It is widely recognized that international law may require disobedience as a response to domestic authorities that order or legalize war crimes, yet this obligation to disobey is commonly conceptualized as a kind of byproduct of efforts to establish compliance with international norms. Drawing on empirical and theoretical scholarship analyzing “crimes of obedience,” this article investigates the demand for disobedience as articulated in international legal conventions and in war crimes trials dealing with lower-level soldiers and civilian authorities. It argues that disobedience is an important response to war crimes and that the capacity to disobey abusive authorities does not follow logically or inevitably from a commitment to obey laws that criminalize their abuses. In international criminal law, the obligation to disobey abusive authorities has been articulated in ways that require the exercise of critical judgment, as well as moral and political agency, in order to overcome various pressures to obey domestic authority. Prominent theoretical explanations of compliance with international law not only neglect the importance of such skills, but call for strategies that are in tension with their development. Closer attention to the role of exemplary disobedience in the legal reasoning animating war crimes prosecutions, I suggest, could strengthen the pedagogical role of legal institutions as a response to criminal obedience and as interventions in the politics of memory.

Radical Restorative Justice and the Practice of Listening: Lessons from South Africa

This chapter proposes that debates on restorative justice and comparative political thought might be usefully brought together and analyzed with attention to the theme of listening as a dimension of justice and political theory. Like contributions by Moore and Baxter, this chapter examines the theme of dialogue and its limits. It suggests that a major contribution of scholarly debates on restorative justice and comparative political thought is their role in exposing the importance, as well as the difficulty, of good listening as a dimension of theoretical dialogue. Drawing on theoretical debates on restorative justice among participants in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process, the chapter reflects on why listening is difficult for political theorists and what it would mean to value and cultivate good listening as a dimension of political theory and restorative justice. In so doing, the chapter also reflects on the theme of “theory as politics” that is explored in several contributions to this volume, including chapters by O’Neill, Baxter, Gordy, London, and Thomas. More specifically, this chapter considers how political theorists might pursue important goals associated with restorative justice and comparative political thought by listening to the voices and ideas of political actors.

If Only More Such Stories Could Have Been Told: Ways of Remembering Resistance

This article considers how greater attention to the memory of resistance might alter the parameters of contemporary efforts to reckon with systematic abuse. I take the Eichmann Trial, which featured numerous testimonies on resistance, as a point of departure for considering the implications of distinctive ways of remembering resistance. The article begins by examining how narratives of heroic resistance were integrated into the trial, and considers the responses of two prominent commentators: Hannah Arendt and Haim Gouri. Arendt’s comments offer insight into how exemplary resistance informs the recovering of judgment and agency as responses to complicity, whereas Gouri’s account underscores the role of “unheroic”and anti-heroic testimony in addressing the limitations of exemplars.