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Within the brief history of the field of transitional justice, South African renderings of reconciliation both loom large and occupy an exceptional and somewhat unstable place. This chapter, critically examines this placement by considering, first (and all too partially), the history of reconciliation in South Africa and the place of the South African TRC within the recent history of truth commissions, and second, the ambivalent uptake of the language of reconciliation on the part of elite international actors within the field of transitional justice, with a particular view to the International Center of Transitional Justice, founded in the aftermath of the South African TRC and the world’s largest nongovernmental organization devoted specifically to the theory and practice of transitional justice.

This introduction, following a Preface describing in narrative form the experience of Uncle San (a fictional Cambodian villager featured in a graphic/comic booklet produced by the Khmer Institute of Democracy (KID) for tribunal outreach—I also refer to him and the KID booklet throughout my book), describes argument of the book and provides a basic overview of the court.The first half of the introduction describes the “transitional justice imaginary,” a set of utopian democratization and human rights ideals suggesting the tribunal will transform authoritarian regimes to liberal democratic societies. The “justice facade” is a metaphor for the manifestations of this imaginary in transitional justice settings like Cambodia. After unpacking the assumptions of this imaginary (teleology, progressivism, universalism, globalism, and binary essentialism) and contextualizing it within the transitional justice (and related democratization, peacebuilding, and human rights) literatures, I offer an alternative approach, phenomenological transitional justice, which focuses on lived experience and practice enmeshed in contexts of power. To understand if international justice has a point in transitional justice settings like Cambodia, I argue it is necessary to step behind the facade to look at its meaning in everyday life and practice.

The central nexus of Chapter 1 the Lecumberri Palace, commonly known as the Black Palace—the state prison inaugurated in 1901, turned into the General National Archive in 1976, and the site of the public announcement of President Vicente Fox’s transparency reforms in 2002. Lecumberri is also the locus of the two early testimonial narratives on the 68 student movement and Tlatelolco massacre, by Luis González de Alba and José Revueltas. Their analysis shows how this theoretically closed, impermeable institution constitutes a node within the network of the modern spaces of discipline and, at the same time, the microcosm of Mexico City. On the other hand, the transmutations of Lecumberri serve to reflect on different modes of knowledge production, history writing and commemoration. Both the prison and the archive are shown to be more than just physical spaces—they are results of the ongoing embodied interpretative processes.

Forensic exhumations are part of transitional justice processes worldwide. In a “forensic turn” in memory politics, the judicial evidence found on victim's bodies is believed to contribute to the historic record. A recent memory movement in Spain, for example, uses exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War era and Francoist dictatorship to break Spain's “pact of forgetting.” Contrary to international trends, however, the Spanish exhumations are conducted outside a legal framework. Moreover, given that Spain's war record is subject to a prohibition on political representation, the exhumations do not so much reveal unknown facts as they uncover silences. Colaert contends that although the inscription of Spain's collective memory in the forensic turn helps to overcome political silences regarding a violent past, it also limits the exhumations' contribution to the search for forensic truth.