Countries around the world have developed a wide range of innovative strategies to hold perpetrators accountable for past human rights violations. To date, systematic and cross-national research has focused on three main mechanisms: criminal trials, truth commissions, and amnesties. The project aims to develop an empirically-tested theory of the adoption, diffusion, and impact of a fuller set of transitional justice mechanisms. In pursuit of this aim, the researchers will add to their existing transitional justice database 'alternative accountabilities' (i.e., civil trials, lustration and vetting, reparations, and customary justice). The project addresses an important scholarly and policy question: do alternative accountabilities successfully substitute or complement other transitional justice mechanisms to strengthen human rights protections, democracy, and peace? This project further develops the earlier research of the PIs, in which they have found that trials are critical to positive democracy and human rights improvements. While alternative accountabilities are used around the world in combination with trials and amnesties or alone, no systematic research on their impact exists to date. This project will fill that void. The project?s intellectual merit involves developing a new theory of when, how, and why these mechanisms contribute to human rights, democracy, and peace that the researchers will produce for scholarly publication.
The project's broader impact includes academic training, policy-development, and future research. The grant will further the professional development of post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, and the research team will produce policy recommendations regarding alternative accountabilities that the team will present to policy-makers. Finally, the researchers' online database will allow academic and policy-oriented researchers around the world to have access to the most up-to-date and comprehensive database on a full set of transitional justice mechanisms used from 1970 to the present.
