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In transitional contexts, reporting does not simply present the facts, but instead shapes the parameters for interpreting divisive political issues. Coverage in such polarized contexts can mitigate or obscure the substance of transitional justice efforts to establish what happened, who the victims were, and who was responsible for the violations. It can either catalyze or paralyze the debate on how to repair victims and ensure that systematic violence does not recur.

More than fifty years of conflict in Colombia have left hundreds of thousands of victims of multiple forms of violence, such as forced disappearance, murder, extra-judicial executions, kidnappings, torture and various forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape.

In the years immediately before the 2015 election, there was a palpable sense of waiting among those working in Burmese civil society. Many of their plans depended on one or two critical developments to take hold: the NLD coming to power and the signing of a nationwide ceasefire agreement. Now, both long-hoped-for events have happened, and Myanmar’s transition to democratic rule continues to move slowly forward.

Sexual violence against men and boys in times of conflict or repression is alarmingly common— and takes a markedly consistent form across contexts in terms of how it affects victims and societies as a human rights violation that is taboo to talk about. It has been committed in all cultures, geographic regions, and time periods. Today, while some of the silence surrounding the issue of sexual violence against women is being broken, unfortunately effective measures of justice and redress are still not understood or applied in ways that can support male victims.

Since Georgia’s independence in 1991, successive governments have struggled to deal with endemic corruption, organized crime, and various disputes along its borders, which sometimes sparked into armed conflict. Efforts to combat corruption and organized crime through its “zero-tolerance” policy on crime degenerated into extensive human rights violations. These human rights violations most notably involved torture and ill-treatment in detention, arbitrary arrests, and denial of due process protections, as well as confiscations of property.

In many countries of the African Great Lakes region, state-led approaches to transitional justice have been created by wide-ranging agreements or policies that have been later forgotten or only partially implemented. Even when implemented, they are often subject to years of delay and/or contention.This has left civil society, including victims’ groups, to try to fill the gaps in responding to victims’ rights and needs, while simultaneously advocating for government to fulfill its obligations

Defining court-ordered reparations for victims of sexual violence committed during armed conflict, political violence, or state repression is not an easy task. The challenges only increase when there are few domestic precedents for defining such reparations based on international human rights law or international humanitarian law.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, Latin American countries have undergone various processes of political transformation. In general terms, this change has consisted of a transition from authoritarian to democratic regimes. In some specific cases, such as Guatemala and El Salvador, the transition consisted of peace processes after armed confrontations that had reached such proportions as to become known commonly as “civil wars”. Political scientists have studied such transformations extensively.

What hope is there for justice for victims of atrocities in profoundly fractured societies, where systems of government have broken down and social and political divisions run deep? What is the role of transitional justice in forging peace in countries like Colombia, after decades of conflict? Or in countries like Tunisia, after years of repression and corrosive corruption?

This report presents the main findings of a multiyear research project conducted by the International Center for Transitional Justice on the challenges and opportunities of responding to serious and massive human rights violations in different contexts. The project commissioned 21 studies on a wide range of contextual issues, 12 of which are included in an ICTJ edited volume, Justice Mosaics: How Context Shapes Transitional Justice in Fractured Societies.