Transitional Justice

We are pleased to announce Transcript 19, a new collective volume in which Mohamed-Salah Omri and Philippe Roussin present an international view of justice in nations coming out of oppression: Literature, Democracy and Transitional Justice: Comparative World Perspectives. This is one of five new titles being announced today in what has become a very dynamic series: the others are here, here, here, and here.

Transitional justice is the stuff of truth and reconciliation commissions, and not only in states which have undergone massive and visible changes of regime: post-war Germany, say, or post-Franco Spain, or post-apartheid South Africa. Even states which think of themselves as democracies are pretty often in some sort of transition, even if it's only from complacent lies to a reluctant truth-telling. The Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday — a twelve-year enquiry into events in a single town centre on 30 January 1972 — was also a sort of transitional justice. This is what we now do when we have had to accept that bad stuff happened, and that even if we're not going to send an awful lot of state officials to prison, we can still own up to our faults.

The excellent cover (if we say so ourselves) is a piece called ‘Satellites #2’ by the artist Raihana Omri, who as it happens is Mohamed-Salah's daughter: it's one of a series of prints inspired by her travels in Tunisia.

Literature, Democracy and Transitional Justice is due out in our Transcript series in 2022.