This chapter introduces the topic and trajectory of the field of transitional justice, with a particular focus on its political and ideological origins in the third wave of democratic transitions of the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that those origins have served to shape the parameters of transitional justice theory, policy and practice up through the present day, generating a “dominant script” that has gone on to be replicated throughout the world almost irrespective of suitability to context. In essence, this script assumes that the combination of atrocity justice for violations of physical integrity and neoliberal democracy can generate peace. It has helped to cement the narrow and neoliberal understandings of “violence” and “peace” and “justice” that will be placed under the microscope in subsequent chapters. I look to the internationalization, legalization and professionalization as keys to understanding both the growth of transitional justice, together with the professional sensibilities and predispositions of the field today. The chapter concludes with an overview of the contested peripheries of the field, which have been pushed to the margins under the field’s dominant script.