This concluding chapter synthesises the handbook’s exploration of victim engagement in transitional justice. It emphasises how the generational framework sheds light on historical shifts and contemporary dynamics throughout the chapters and cases in this book, from the foundational influence of early mobilisation to disruptive modes of resistance today, and how it deepens understanding of the proliferation of intersecting justice struggles through innovative adoption and adaptation of the paradigm. These developments challenge static, state-centric understandings of transitional justice and reveal its porous, evolving boundaries. Key themes for future research include the importance of relationality and relational justice approaches, the sustainability and intergenerational character of justice efforts, and the interplay between decentralisation and translocal agency in victim-led initiatives. Framing transitional justice as an expanding, victim-driven practice embedded within a wider justice ecosystem, the chapter argues for reimagining the field through epistemological and methodological pluralism, alongside deeper ethical reflexivity in scholarship, policy, and practice.

This chapter summarizes the book’s main findings and discusses five major contributions to the study of transitional justice (TJ) as a powerful force to prevent criminal wars in new democracies: (1) the importance of conceptualizing organized crime as a hybrid field of state–criminal networks, where state specialists in violence play a central role; (2) TJ’s power to influence peace and war in the criminal underworld by exposing and sanctioning state specialists in violence; (3) the crucial role of state accountability for the development of peaceful democracies; (4) the importance of dismantling violent counterinsurgent states by means of justice before electoral competition becomes routinized in new democracies; and (5) the dangers that the survival of the counterinsurgent state and its militarized public security practices, and the persistence of criminal wars, pose for the integrity of democratic regimes. The book ends with a reflection on Third Wave democracies. In the mid 1980s, scholars of democratization warned elites and societies to renounce (or at least postpone) demands for accountability for past atrocities to avoid a military backlash that would compromise democratic stability. Accountability Shock draws a different conclusion: Failure to address a repressive past paves the way for a future of democratic instability, large-scale violence, and gross human rights violations.

This chapter develops the theoretical explanation of why transitional justice processes and the reckoning of a repressive history can prevent the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence in new democracies. It first discusses a new conception of organized crime where complicit state specialists in violence are central players in illicit economies and in the production of large-scale criminal violence. It suggests that these engagements often emerge in autocracies, where autocrats allow military and police forces to capitalize on their repressive power to kill political dissidents and on their de facto impunity to control the criminal underworld. If left unaccountable, authoritarian specialists in violence can become leading actors in the production of criminal violence in democracy by defecting to fight turf wars or defending organized criminal groups from positions of power or spearheading Wars on Drugs, Gangs, or Crime. It claims that when new democratic elites expose and sanction authoritarian specialists in violence through robust truth commissions and criminal trials, they unleash a powerful accountability shock that breaks state impunity and deters security forces from using state coercive power to control illicit economies through lethal force. Failure to reckon with a repressive history, and the survival of the violent state, sets new democracies on trajectories of power abuse and criminal wars.

Proceedings before the International Criminal Court (ICC) can form integral parts of encompassing transitional justice processes for addressing international crimes. Therefore, the ICC’s principle of complementarity is essential to determine whether justice must be served and by whom – states or the ICC. In April 2024, the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor published its first Policy on Complementarity and Cooperation, which reflects a broader evolution of victims’ roles in international law: from non-recognition to justice actors with numerous rights and an independent voice in proceedings. It emphasises strategic partnership and vigilance as tools for diminishing the impunity gap and bringing justice closer to victims. This chapter examines the policy through the lens of generations of victim participation. It concludes that structural changes at the ICC are necessary to maximise the policy’s potential for continuous meaningful victim participation at all stages of proceedings nationally, regionally, and internationally.

Chile is a paradigmatic transitional justice case illustrating the sequencing, coexistence, and intermingling of the types of victim engagement that this book examines. This chapter traces active (co)-creation by relatives in the search for the Disappeared in dictatorial and post-dictatorship Chile. It outlines the gradual accretion of different forms of engagement: denunciation and resistance, legal activism and political lobbying, and protagonism in calling for, and calling forth, a new state policy response in the form of a National Search Plan, launched in 2023. Analysing relatives’ participation in design of the Search Plan meanwhile reveals divergent and changing views about the relative importance of trials, truth, recovery, and identification of those still disappeared. Overall, Chile’s trajectory shows how many now-familiar categories of transitional justice demands were originally hard won from below. It also suggests the state may at times be needed to mediate between contrasting or contradictory victims’ voices.

This chapter explores how in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as a non-transitional context, transitional justice discourse and logic is mobilised in diverse and innovative ways. While some justice initiatives explicitly adopt the rhetoric of transitional justice, others align with its logic and objectives without directly invoking the language. The chapter examines three key cases: how specific groups, such as youth, engage in transitional justice claims; how particular demands, notably regarding sexual and gender-based violence, shape justice efforts; and how transitional justice is repurposed in new struggles, including environmental justice. Through perspectives from eastern DRC, the chapter highlights how innovation and experimentation emerge in response to institutional limitations and contextual needs, ultimately questioning and expanding the boundaries of transitional justice as both a discourse and a practice.

This chapter examines the evolving engagement of the Syrian diaspora in Germany with justice processes through the lens of post-revolutionary diasporic consciousness. It focuses on the intersection between accountability for the Assad regime’s atrocities and the broader struggle against structural oppression and political exclusion in exile. Syrians living in the diaspora face a dual struggle. They address Syria’s violent past while grappling with marginalisation in host countries. Disillusionment with Universal Jurisdiction frameworks, coupled with anti-migration policies, has led to a shift towards grassroots and artistic practices that better reflect lived realities. As a result, Syrian justice efforts simultaneously mobilise and demobilise elements of different transitional justice approaches, rather than following a linear progression or standardised logic. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2024, the chapter argues that the intersecting identities and positionalities of Syrian migrants shape intersecting justice struggles, reframing justice as a transnational, multi-faceted pursuit of recognition, inclusion, and agency.

Businesses have a long-standing record of involvement in severe human rights violations, a trend that continues today and is likely to persist, and that is often aggravated during periods of conflict. However, corporate actors have mostly been excluded from transitional justice mechanisms, and corporate accountability remains an elusive element of transitional justice. In this context of impunity, scholars have called for the inclusion of economic actors in transitional justice processes and for stronger links between the transitional justice and business and human rights (BHR) fields. Focusing on Colombia, this chapter explores the mobilisation of victims’ organisations during and after the Peace Agreements, highlighting their pivotal role in shaping transitional justice and BHR debates and contesting corporate impunity. It underscores the need for context-sensitive, legally binding accountability mechanisms, and argues that addressing corporate complicity in conflict is not only essential for achieving justice but also a demand rooted in victims’ lived experiences, offering valuable insights for the intersection of transitional justice and BHR.

While the international legal issues related to the search for disappeared persons have received considerable attention, limited research has been conducted on how participation in the search impacts victims’ lives. In particular, we argue that the importance of victim recognition needs to be inserted into these discussions, and our understanding improved about what types of institutional and social responses are needed to ensure effective and victim-oriented search processes. Our chapter utilises the concept of ‘recognition relationships’ with reference to two cases: Colombia and El Salvador. Our discussion illuminates the ways in which a focus on recognition relationships captures the dynamics of power, mobilisation, and participation which are central to any successful and just search process.

In situations of aparadigmatic transitions, where formal transitional justice mechanisms do not exist, or may only partially exist, ‘victims’ are typically the most active drivers behind a range of intersecting justice struggles. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Kabul with war victims since 2008, this chapter underlines the importance of a bottom-up and victim-centred approach towards memorialisation and accountability efforts. This approach emphasises participation, agency and empowerment. In particular, it elaborates on the meaningfulness of methodologies used in the Theatre of the Oppressed to engage, raise awareness, and create participatory forums for war victims in Afghanistan from 2009 to August 2021. These methodologies offer various perspectives on understanding the protagonism of victims, and require us to embrace and recognise different approaches to engaging in the justice process.

This chapter presents the statistical analysis of the main theoretical propositions across countries. It first discusses the sample of seventy-six Third Wave democracies (1974–2005), why the homicide rate is used as the metric of criminal violence, and the different indices created to capture various dimensions of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws. It then explains why we test for the immediate and cumulative impacts of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws and their joint effects. Using the global sample and a subsample of seventeen Latin American countries, the results indicate that truth commissions have a strong deterrent effect on the murder rate and criminal prosecution only has an impact when combined with truth commissions. The joint effect of truth and justice represents the accountability shock’s violence-reducing effect. The shock is more powerful in the Latin American subsample. Additional models reveal two crucial points: (1) to have an effect, the accountability shock needs to be robust; and (2) the effect of the accountability shock (absent other measures) expires after about ten years. The positive association between amnesty laws and higher homicide rates reinforces the conclusion that persistent state impunity promotes violence, underscoring the importance of accountability for past atrocities as necessary for future violence reduction.

This chapter uses the Latin American case studies presented in the previous chapters to identify general cross-national patterns and historically ground the theory and statistical findings about transitional justice’s (TJ) violence prevention effect. It first shows that during the Cold War all six countries developed counterinsurgent states with striking similarities under autocracy. In all cases, authoritarian specialists in violence capitalized on their power to kill with impunity to dominate the criminal underworld. It then discusses how TJ was a fork in the road. The adoption of robust TJ processes, combining strong truth commissions and criminal prosecution of perpetrators, allowed Argentina, Peru, and Guatemala to dismantle counterinsurgent states, preventing criminal wars and reducing violence and gross human rights violations. But the persistence of state impunity and the survival of the counterinsurgent state led to Wars on Drugs or Gangs or Crime and to turf wars that resulted in mass atrocities in Mexico, El Salvador, and Brazil. The final section discusses how in cases with robust TJ the institutionalization of accountability policies can contribute to the development of self-sustaining peaceful democracies, and how a reformulated TJ toolkit can serve democracies with persistent impunity, trapped in deadly criminal wars, enter into paths of peaceful reconstruction.

The integration of technology into human rights practice in Latin America has been marked by scepticism and practical challenges. This chapter traces the origins of technology’s intersection with human rights in the region, beginning in the late 1980s in the Southern Cone, as grassroots actors responded to state repression and creatively used technology to document violations. It explores the bundle of risks and opportunities that human rights practitioners faced when using technology in creative ways to confront human rights challenges. It identifies three main obstacles to integration: a legal-centric approach to human rights, a language barrier given the English-language predominance in the tech sector, and wariness of technology. The text highlights some breakthroughs, deriving from bottom-up adoption of technology, and provides discrete examples of local innovation. The chapter concludes by stressing the ongoing need to adapt and better harness technological advances in Latin America while also learning from local experiences.

This chapter analyzes two countries where criminal economies have thrived in marginalized urban communities, yet only Brazil experiences localized criminal wars while Argentina faces limited violence. The chapter explains how the Brazilian military dictatorship developed a counterinsurgent state with an extensive intelligence and repressive apparatus that allowed its specialists in violence’s involvement in illicit economies. The first democratic government failed to hold authoritarian specialists in violence accountable, and validated a military-era amnesty law, enabling the survival of the counterinsurgent state. Authoritarian security forces adapted counterinsurgency practices to launch wars on crime, sold protection to gangs, or controlled illicit markets, turning Brazil into one of the world’s most violent democracies. The chapter then discusses the development of Argentina’s counterinsurgent state. It analyzes the role of the security apparatus in developing a clandestine carceral system to perpetrate gross human right violations and the participation of authoritarian specialists in violence in illicit markets in dictatorship. After transitioning to democracy, Argentina’s first administration initiated a robust truth commission and the historic trial of the military juntas, unlocking Latin America’s most powerful accountability shock. Multiple truth and justice “boosters” contributed to dismantle the counterinsurgent state, to deflate criminal markets, and to put the country on a path of relative peaceful development.

The chapter examines the Saturday Mothers, a long-standing intergenerational movement in Turkey advocating for justice for families of the disappeared. Through a relational lens, it explores how the movement constructs a social network that fosters solidarity, collective agency, and transformative personal and political identities. The Saturday Mothers, operating as a ‘political family’, challenge conventional definitions of family by creating a space of care, empathy, and shared grief. Their horizontal and transparent structure sustains their activism across diverse political, social, and economic backgrounds. The movement’s practices address the impact of ambiguous loss, enabling families to cope with psychological isolation and social marginalisation. By reclaiming public spaces such as Galatasaray Square as symbolic sites of truth and memory, they demand holistic justice. The chapter highlights how the Saturday Mothers’ grassroots mobilisation practises a relational agency, redefining victim participation and creating a social space for truth-telling and healing beyond the limitations of formal transitional justice mechanisms.

Drawing on extensive consultations with relevant stakeholders in Uganda, this chapter seeks to understand how the international standardisation of transitional justice has impacted domestic transitional justice processes in Uganda, and notably victims’ roles therein. It zooms in on the increasingly sanitised involvement and participation of local stakeholders, including victims. The chapter shows how, despite the presence of language such as ‘local consultation’, ‘participation’, and ‘victims-centeredness’, a genuine intention among decision-makers to give meaningful effect to such principles has been missing. As such, formal ‘compliance’ with ideas about civil society and victim participation, as endorsed by international standards and guidelines about transitional justice, has not resulted in outcomes that met the expectations and demands of most local civil society and victim groups in Uganda. The chapter focuses mainly on the process surrounding the adoption of Uganda’s Transitional Justice Policy, but adds perspectives from other relevant frameworks and processes where particularly relevant.

This chapter explores how, after signing United Nations-sponsored peace agreements to end protracted civil wars, post-authoritarian El Salvador and Guatemala followed different trajectories of peace and violence. It first traces the development of El Salvador’s counterinsurgent state under military rule and its transformation during the civil war. It analyzes how the civil war military establishment, special military forces, and clandestine death squads capitalized on their repressive power to fight guerrillas through brutal force and on de facto impunity to engage in multiple illicit economies. The peace agreement led to an influential truth commission, but an amnesty neutralized it, preserving impunity and the counterinsurgent state. Right- and left-wing governments used counterinsurgent forces to launch Wars on Gangs, and state-gang and inter-gang warfare turned El Salvador into the world’s murder capital. It then discusses the rise of the counterinsurgent state during Guatemala’s civil war and the institutional transformations that empowered the military, elite and paramilitary forces, and death squads to lead a genocidal campaign against the Mayan people while becoming intimately involved in criminal markets. Two truth commissions exposed war atrocities and subsequently a reformed Guatemalan law enforcement, assisted by the International Commission against Impunity, dismantled criminal structures linked to the military establishment, deflating criminal markets, and driving down the murder rate.

This chapter introduces the questions and puzzles that drive the book’s research, outlines the theoretical argument, explains the research design and multimethod approach, and summarizes the main empirical findings. By examining the contrasting experiences of post-authoritarian development in Mexico and Peru, it establishes two paths that Third Wave democracies followed: criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence or relatively peaceful development. Existing explanations focusing on poverty and inequality, state capacity, and history of political instability, predict that Peru would experience significant violence in democracy while Mexico would follow a path of relatively peaceful development. Yet by adopting an ambitious transitional justice (TJ) process to reckon with its repressive history, Peru prevented the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence and criminal wars while Mexico did not. The chapter presents the building blocks of the theoretical explanation. It discusses why we need a new definition of organized crime and large-scale criminal violence that places violent states and authoritarian specialists in violence at the center. It then explains why developing peaceful democracies requires dismantling the violent state and why TJ mechanisms are uniquely suited to this task. It concludes with a discussion of the multimethod strategy for theory-testing and the findings and their implications for the study of peaceful democracies.

The notion of truth is a powerful one within transitional justice, and truth-telling and truth-seeking are considered to be a necessary part of any justice pursuit. Also in the US, official government actors are creating truth commissions (or truth commission-like processes) in order to acknowledge and address a wide range of violent and discriminatory contexts, both historical and present-day. This chapter explores two such truth commissions operating at the sub-national level, namely in the states of Maryland and California. Drawing from participatory scholarship, the chapter evaluates these examples and highlights how current and future truth processes can better conceptualise and implement victim participation in order to have deeper engagement and impact with affected communities. Examining these efforts around agency and empowerment can shed light on broader developments around formalised participation, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the second generation of victim engagement in transitional justice practices in the US.