The field of transitional justice—concerned as it is with the mechanisms of recovery from societal conflict and mass violence—has long found its de facto home in legal theory. While this is in many respects a natural pairing, I argue that just as transitional justice has expanded in scope from the regime-change paradigm to general situations of human rights violations, so too should our conception of it expand from the purely legalistic to the more explicitly ethical. This paper makes the case (...) that while transitional justice remains undertheorized along ethical dimensions, increased attention to both the ethical underpinnings of justice interventions and the ability of ethical work to center the individual experience might go a great distance towards addressing what Pablo de Greiff has identified as three of the chief challenges facing transitional justice today: insufficient attention to context, formulism, and technocratic tendencies. (shrink)

The eminent philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt once attended a similar trial with a similar plea: the 1961 trial of the mid‐level Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. She portrayed him as an exemplar of what she termed the banality of evil. After his capture in 1960, Eichmann was tried on charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Eichmann was an exemplary case of the thoughtlessness and lack of self‐reflection that goes into setting unthinkable atrocities into motion. Like Eichmann, Mao (...) doesn't cut the figure of a hardline fanatic, blinded by ideology. Mao's unwillingness to place the cause ahead of his own desires should indicate that he isn't wholly blinded by fanaticism, as Dresden is. In her characterizations of Eichmann, Arendt noted his odd lack of imagination, his inability, in other words, “to think from the standpoint of someone else.”. (shrink)

Hobbes would say that this level of apprehension is inevitable in any society that isn't governed by a sufficiently powerful central ruler. Just as in our world, some people or groups would have more power than others, and some of these might have more power than most. The Emperor would still be subject to the demands of the Spacing Guild, for example, while the Spacing Guild would still need to be on good terms with the governor of Arrakis because of (...) the Guild's absolute dependence upon spice. In a world like this, it would be difficult not to see potential threats around every corner, and with good reason. And in this state of wariness, political and social stability will be tough to attain. Hobbes had seen firsthand the terrible destruction that civil war could unleash, the horrific loss of life and destruction of security. (shrink)