Breaking the Echo Chambers of Transitional Justice and TWAIL: An Intellectual and Policy Exchange

ABSTRACT∞ Transitional justice and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) converge and diverge in ways that make an exchange between them worthwhile. Despite their continuous academic development, they increasingly confront themselves with existential questions that retain their insular echo chambers. While they center the importance of addressing historical legacies of injustice to build more just futures, their approaches differ. They straddle the worlds of policy prescription (transitional justice) and scholarly praxis (TWAIL) in ways that confine them to their margins. Both fields’ circular introspection is fed through unrepresentative knowledge production and the absence of theories of justice and resistance that appeal to diverse political communities. This article argues that transitional justice should adopt TWAILian indeterminacy and that TWAIL could benefit from transitional justice’s more policy-oriented goals. Ultimately, it argues that rigorous scholarly exchanges between both fields present questions that begin to make cracks in their respective echo chambers.