The paradox of justice in divided settings

Abstract Increasing polarization across many contexts raises the question of whether justice measures exacerbate or mitigate social divisions. To develop hypotheses about how justice operates in divided contexts, this article draws on theoretical perspectives from the interdisciplinary field of transitional justice. It examines convergence and divergence in fairness evaluations using a fully randomized conjoint experiment. The experiment was embedded in nationally stratified online surveys in Japan ( n = 2,700) and South Korea ( n = 3,000). The bilateral setting provided a useful research site for a study of a divided context: contested colonial legacies and a variety of justice measures for addressing the past, which were suitable for experimental manipulation. The results show that most justice measures elicit opposing responses in the two countries while simultaneously reducing differences between them. This reveals a paradox of justice: even divisive justice measures can, under certain conditions, bring groups closer together. This framework enables to classify the effects of justice measures into convergent, divergent, and paradoxical configurations and to consider the theoretical and empirical implications for existing and future experimental research on social conflict and divided societies across disciplines.