Twenty years of transitional justice: reading a field through the International Journal of Transitional Justice 2006–2026

The 20th anniversary of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (IJTJ) offers an opportunity not simply to celebrate two decades of scholarship but also to reflect critically on the intellectual transformations that have shaped transitional justice during this period. This editorial introduces a retrospective collection of 20 contributions selected from across the journal’s history. The collection is not intended as a definitive canon, nor as a ranking of the journal’s ‘best’ articles. Rather, it is conceived as an intellectual history of a field in motion. To reconstruct that history, our selections combine evidence of scholarly and readership impact with nominations from past and present editors, while also seeking balance across time periods, disciplines, methodologies, regions, themes and academic–practitioner perspectives.

Read collectively, the 20 contributions reveal a field that has repeatedly reconsidered its own boundaries. Transitional justice has expanded from an initial concern with accountability, truth, reparations and political transition towards sustained engagement with development, peacebuilding, socioeconomic inequality, everyday life, gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, structural violence, victim participation, archives, civil society, complex identities and democratic decline. This has coincided with an evolving profile of the scholars engaging in the field. While legal scholars and political scientists initially shaped the debates around formal processes and the constraints imposed by international law, social scientists with interests in grassroots and non-state-level processes now do so. While stopping violence was seen initially as a sufficient goal for transitional justice processes, now transformation and addressing structural impediments to justice are more commonly invoked. This history is not adequately described as a linear progression. From its earliest volumes, IJTJ provided space for ethnography, practitioner knowledge, survivor perspectives and critiques of universalist assumptions; and formal processes and legal questions remain features of the contemporary scholarly terrain. From its origins, scholars debated what counts as success for the field and questioned whether transitional justice processes could achieve what scholars and practitioners hoped. What has changed is the depth and cumulative force of challenges to the conceptual categories and of the multiple lenses that disciplines bring to understanding violence, transition, victimhood, justice and political transformation.

The 20 contributions tell a story of intellectual expansion accompanied by increasing self-reflexivity. They show transitional justice becoming less certain about where transition begins and ends; less willing to treat legal institutions as its sole centre of gravity; increasingly attentive to the actors, structures and forms of knowledge previously marginalized by dominant frameworks; and unclear about where the boundaries of transitional justice end and how to evaluate the success of transitional justice processes in promoting enduring change. In celebrating 20 years of IJTJ, this retrospective consequently celebrates not the consolidation of a settled paradigm but the capacity of a field to remain open to critique, empirical challenge and conceptual transformation.