Anthropology, Transitional Justice and Criminal Law

Interdisciplinarity has been a central methodological feature of the study of transitional justice.1 However, undertaking research across disciplinary terrains is not without its controversies. In 2009, Christine Bell raised a provocative critique of interdisciplinarity and transitional justice, arguing that it works as a legitimating mechanism for the construction of transitional justice as a ‘field’ of study and in so doing risks obscuring, or even diluting, the crucial normative work of law in adjudicating ‘the rights and wrongs of a conflict.’2 This critique provided a timely warning not to presuppose the value of an interdisciplinary approach. Yet it also assumed that law’s normative claims when responding to widespread violence are themselves settled and clear. The intricacies of the doctrinal debates in international criminal law suggest that there remains contestation over how the law draws the specific lines that establish individual criminal liability. This recognition prompts us to examine how other disciplines can contribute to normative theorizing in criminal law, unpicking how it may or may not deal with the exceptionality of responding to large-scale violence.3

Criminal justice · Criminal law · Criminology · Discipline · Economic Justice · Normative · Political science · Sociology · Transitional justice · Cambodian History and Society · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law