Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 35, August 2014.
Using insights from the legal transplant literature to analyze the transplanting of truth commissions, this paper finds that truth commissions will face more challenges conducting their mandates in post-conflict versus post-authoritarian societies. In post-conflict societies, the combination of weak institutions to support a truth-telling process, combined with large numbers of victims and perpetrators will tend to overwhelm truth commissions. These factors concomitant with lower levels of moral consensus surrounding mass violence interact to make truth commissions function less optimally in post-conflict contexts. Much more experimentation needs to be done to formulate effective and contextually appropriate responses to mass violence instead of the current “one-size-fits-all” approach.