The topic of transitional justice has been with me, one way or another, for a long time. Let me illustrate with three episodes, beginning with the most recent.

On April 10, 2003, the day after the fall of Baghdad, I got an e-mail from a Canadian journalist who wanted to ask me some questions about “de-Baathification” in Iraq. (I told him that the main policy options were purges, trials, and exposure by truth commissions, each of these having several subvarieties.) By the beginning of the twenty-first century, one of the first questions that come to mind when an autocratic regime falls is indeed how to hold the leadership to account and to block its influence in the future. Another, of course, is how to build a new and better regime. A third question is how to deal with the victims of the regime. The present book is mainly concerned with the two backward-looking issues: how societies respond to wrongdoings and sufferings. I also consider forward-looking issues such as economic reconstruction and constitution-making, but only to the extent that they interact with the backward-looking ones. I mainly try to describe and explain variations in how societies close their open accounts from the past after regime transitions. Normative considerations enter indirectly, however, through the conceptions of justice and fairness that may animate the actors of transition and enter in the explanation of their behavior.