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Transitional Justice From Below: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change. By Kieran McEvoy and Lorna McGregor, eds. Oxford, UK, and Portland, OR: Hart, 2008. Pp. 254. $56.70 paper.
McEvoy and McGregor's edited collection is part of a growing current within transitional justice that seeks to move beyond the constraints of a scholarship dominated by lawyers and legalism. At issue are both the academics of normative inquiry and the real-life consequences of transitional justice that is imposed or acculturated "from above" and fails to translate into meaningful change for ordinary people "below." The collection is both timely and refreshing. Timely because despite the fully recognized need to avoid "one-size-fits-all" policies (see United Nations Secretary-General 2004), the internafional community has only begun to experiment or engage with such things as hybrid institutions, complementarity, and traditional justice - and not necessarily that successfully. The book is refreshing because it leaves aside well-worn debates about truth, impunity, the rule of law, and restorative justice to tackle transitional justice from novel or underexplored perspectives within criminology, political economy, international development, and sociolegal studies.
"Above" and "below" are the operative linchpins throughout the collection. The principal criticism of top-down transitional justice is that it produces a thin, simplifying discourse that is easily transferred or appropriated. It treats post-conflict states as largely interchangeable as seen, for example, in...