Research

Tasked with producing the most innovative work in the field, the ICTJ Research Unit addresses important gaps in scholarship and provides comparative analysis of transitional justice measures and the difficult contexts in which they take place to ICTJ staff and to practitioners worldwide.

Over the past six years, the Research Unit has developed a series of cutting-edge initiatives. Its multiyear project on massive reparations programs resulted in a landmark work, The Handbook on Reparations (Oxford, 2006), which has shaped the research agenda on reparations for years to come, but has had significant and immediate effects in helping to design reparations programs in Morocco and Peru, among other countries. In late 2006 the unit launched its Advancing Transitional Justice Series, with the publication of two new edited volumes. What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations (SSRC, 2006), the first product of a multiyear project, contains groundbreaking case studies of gender and reparations policies in six countries. Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies (SSRC, 2007) presents the results of a uniquely comparative and comprehensive project on vetting in post-conflict and transitional countries.

The Research Unit's projects are designed to pass muster in the most rigorous and demanding academic settings, but, at the same time, to be useful for policy makers and practitioners. One of the goals of all Research Unit projects is to build policymakers' and practitioners' capacity to confront the difficult choices they will face in designing measures of redress for mass atrocity. Policymakers operate in a complex and dynamic environment without access to perfect information. To make sound judgments and have durable effects, policymakers require more than empirical research alone. They need the tools that only normative research can provide: the identification of competing priorities and the development of reasoning for making choices among them. Thus, the findings of both the Unit's reparations and vetting projects have fed into the production of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Rule of Law Tools for Post-Conflict States, which will help guide policy decisions throughout the world.

Major research currently underway includes projects on:

• Transitional Justice and Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR)
• Gender and Reparations: Opportunities for Transitional Democracies?
  

• Identities in Transition: Challenges for Transitional Justice in Divided Societies
• Transitional Justice and Development
• How Things Work
  

Past projects:

• Reparations
• Vetting

 

(Updated June 2008)