West African Network for Transitional Justice

The West African Network for Transitional Justice (WANT Justice) developed out of the African NGOs Affinity Group (ANGO). Its focus is on the rapidly changing transitional justice landscape in West Africa. WANT Justice plans to hold a training session for professors and teachers of human rights to discuss transitional justice. With Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, and Liberia thinking about transitional justice, the demand for the output of this network can only increase.

From December 7-11, 2005, WANT Justice organized a seminar in Accra, Ghana called "Teaching Transitional Justice," an intensive course aimed at enhancing the research agendas and teaching methodologies of university professors and other education professionals.

The Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), the West African Network on Transitional Justice (WANT Justice), and the ICTJ collaborated to host this intensive four-day seminar for professors, advanced Master's and doctoral students, and researchers at think-tanks throughout West Africa to introduce them to the state of the art scholarly thinking in transitional justice. The goal of the course was to provide academics and professors with tools to help them integrate transitional justice into their university curricula and research agendas. The course began with open discussions around a set of readings by the top scholars in the field. The seminar then examined syllabi from transitional justice courses from around the world; discussed the idea of a transitional justice "canon"; and examined teaching methods for integrating transitional justice into the university classroom.