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Vigorous exchanges between those who study charged topics like transitional justice using different approaches can be very helpful in progressing our understanding of the complex issues. But those reading this exchange between James Gibson and me could be left puzzled. While my review of Gibson's work shows how our two approaches can be harmonized, Gibson's review of Skeletons may urge readers to question whether, given such seemingly irreconcilable differences, transitional justice remains one field.
In what follows, I briefly address Gibson's principal concerns. But first, I correct a key conceptual misunderstanding. Gibson objects to what he characterizes as my "overarching approach of rational choice" (p. 425). But the form of rational choice that he condemns is the kind exemplified by classical models of democratization "with or without guarantees" associated with the work of Adam Przeworski and others. This approach, which has shaped the field of Comparative Democratization over the past twenty years, rests on a cost-benefit calculus that disregards time inconsistencies as well as expectations of what other actors might do. Influenced by works such as Donald Green and Ian Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, I have long been deeply dissatisfied with the simplifying assumptions of such models. After all, if the communists had been entirely focused on their "narrow and short-term political interests," they would not have stepped down peacefully. Had they done so, they would have exposed themselves to retribution or (at least) years of subsistence in the political shadow of victorious dissidents. But instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water and rejecting rational choice per se, I set out to develop a model of information asymmetry. In my model, communists know something crucial that the dissidents do not--how infiltrated the dissidents are with secret collaborators. I agree with Gibson that conventional rational choice models based on assumptions about actors' shortsighted narrow economic interests cannot satisfactorily deal with the complexities of transitional justice, and I deliberately seek to go beyond such narrow models.
Gibson offers four substantive criticisms of my book. I address each in turn.
First, he claims that I ignore the possibility that peaceful transitions followed by...