Mariangela Tobbia

Jus post bellum (Jpb) and Transitional Justice (TJ) in Post-War and in Post-Authoritarian Regime Context

How should citizens react to the fall of a non-democratic regime? How should they initiate reconstruction in a country where conflicts are coming to an end? How can we prevent the public from taking justice into its own hands and ensure the criminal law’s goal of specific deterrence in the aftermath of a period of widespread and systematic violations? TJ is a field involved with post-conflict reconstruction. It endeavours to understand what should be done in order to build, from the ruins of the previous society, a new society, stable enough to grant justice and just enough to grant stability, so that new legitimated institutions can be developed in the future. Jpb is a response to the problem of conflict resolution and to the need for a proper organisation of post-conflict peace. Its main goal is to facilitate greater fairness and sustainability in conflict termination and peacemaking. Hence, the notion of jpb concerns what follows a war, focuses on the question of how to end hostilities, or to handle their aftermath. Since both TJ and jpb aim to help move beyond a difficult past and both of them aim for stability and justice, one may argue that they are in fine identical and that those principles which are applicable to one are also applicable to the other. Now, this may not always be true. In fact, even where it is true that both of them involve reconciliation with a violent past, there remains a difference between them in terms of definition and objectives set. This is the reason why, in this paper, I show why these models should not be seen as interchangeable nor as competitors, but as two different, even if compatible, theories.