Transitional Justice in a non-Western Setting

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In 2002 Sierra Leone's brutal 11 year civil war was declared over. Efforts are now underway to consolidate peace. Critical to this project are initiatives in the justice sector, with attempts to reform the local courts, an international war crimes tribunal to try the masterminds of the conflict, and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to restore dignity to the victims and if possible reconcile them with their perpetrators. The question is whether these initiatives are appropriate in a country such as Sierra Leone where certain aspects of local culture, such as strong beliefs in the supernatural and a belief in the virtue of secretiveness, seem at odds with international standards of justice. The fieldwork for this project used anthropological observation, interviews and questionnaires to investigate whether the cultural clash between international and local ideas of justice proved overwhelming, or whether there was evidence of a cross-cultural exchange. It found that international ideas of justice find some success in local culture, but that they don't always succeed in the ways their supporters imagined, and that international justice is far from colonizing the local cultures of Sierra Leone.The proposed research will supplement the results of fieldwork with a desk study and an analysis of trial and truth commission transcripts, writing up the results as a research monograph.