ABSTRACT
Despite their different ages and provenances, rule of law and transitional justice share several features. First, until recently both concepts were largely confined to the philosophical domain rather than being thought applicable to practical policymaking. Rule of law has been the subject of debate and discussion for millennia with limited departure from the Ivory Tower throughout. Transitional justice was briefly a policy choice with the creation of the post-Second World War Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials. Yet, these proceedings were sui generis and gave way to decades of academic debate on transitional justice but on-the-ground inaction. A primary connection between rule of law and transitional justice is that they both only
emerged as fully fledged policy tools after the Cold War. So long as the Soviet Union and the USA remained at loggerheads, there could be little international policy agreement on what ‘rule of law’ or ‘transitional justice’ entailed. Major international bodies, such as the United Nations (UN) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which have played such central roles in promoting the policies of rule of law and transitional justice in the post-Cold War era, were hamstrung by this geopolitical intransigence. It was only with the emergence of a brief Pax Americana in the early 1990s that multi-stakeholder institutions were able to move forward on the ground, implementing policy from long-brewing theory.
