LEGAL STRATEGIES FOR TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE IN POSTCONFLICT SOCIETIES

Trials of kingpins for mass atrocity seek more than retribution for past wrongs and deterrence of future ones. Properly conducted, national prosecution can enable states to reestablish themselves as moral authorities that legitimately represent an entire society, including groups that were recently repressed. Trials also seek to influence the collective memory of the catastrophic events they publicly recount and officially evaluate. Revising public understandings of the country's recent past by dispelling impressions propagated by authoritarian predecessors often becomes a central objective.

New rulers regularly employ atrocity trials in an effort to bring the nation together and establish a new conception of the past. Though they may publicly disavow such a lofty aspiration, they often seek to become intellectual architects of a revised national identity. Through prosecution, they aim to separate the evil past from a brighter future; between these points stands the trial, as the symbolic “act of unequivocal demarcation.”

How sharp a break with the past is really necessary or desirable, to be sure, often becomes more controversial than new rulers would like. Some insist the past regime was not really so bad; others that it was execrable and rupture with it is not yet sufficient. Some contend that even large-scale criminal prosecutions do not break sufficiently with the past.