The Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Transitional Justice

Abstract

Human thought continues to be concerned with the questions that surround justice, rights and equality, and, consequently, with those surrounding the law and the state, authority and citizenship. Inquiry into justice has been a major component of political philosophy and jurisprudence beginning with Plato and Aristotle all the way to Rawls. In its present-day guise, the question of “transitional justice”, which in itself is a novel formulation of legal, social and political praxis, is evidence of the inevitability of this question and its pressing necessity. The question of justice is generally presented through an inquiry into the essence of justice, and the extent of its relation to morality, politics and law, thus providing for a theoretical methodology that examines the ontological foundations and social manifestations of justice. In contrast, this paper examines the question of transitional justice through the discipline of applied ethics.