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This paper examines how international law contributes to contemporary understandings of transitional justice with respect to reparations for victims of gross and systematic human rights abuses. The author surveys the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights through 2003 to determine how the Court’s practice can be used to guide the formulation of reparatory policies during political transition. Recognizing that the direct application of Inter-American case law to situations of mass atrocity is not always viable in practice, the author analyzes regional human rights jurisprudence, particularly that relating to compensation, to determine what role the Court’s rules can and cannot play as a reference for policymakers and societies faced with the challenge of designing a reparations program. He concludes that while landmark Court decisions like Velásquez Rodríguez provide general normative guidance, there are significant obstacles to extending to the transitional justice context many of the measures, amounts, and formulas relied upon by the Court in awarding compensation. The fairness of compensation outside the courtroom cannot be determined with reference to predetermined rules, but depends on the factual context in which the measures are adopted including the number of victims involved. A better source of comparative inspiration is found in the Court’s growing practice of adopting non-monetary reparations measures to deal with moral harm.

Feminists continue to point out that democratic transitions continue to fail to do justice to the victims of gender-based violence despite notable advancements in international law. The gendered nature of sexual violence and its ongoing economic, social, and psychological impacts express and reinforce discriminatory public attitudes and gender inequality beyond moments of democratic transition. For this reason, sexual violence against women should figure as a special category under State-sponsored programs for reparation. However, different forms of gender bias can throw up normative and practical barriers that prevent women from accessing the benefits that reparations programs make available. Reparations programs, nevertheless, like many public policies for recovery and redress continue to be largely gender-blind. This paper explores the challenge of repairing sexual violence against women and how national reparations programs might provide short-term redress while contributing to the achievement of longer-term goals for gender justice.

Compensation for human rights abuse can be approached from two different perspectives. The first is through principles of tort law, under which the compensation of harm for human rights abuse is no different from the compensation of other, ordinary harm. The second is based on principles of administrative compensation, where victims are defined in standardized terms in a statute that provides a relatively fixed, tabulated amount of compensation for all, which is typically smaller than judicial compensation. This paper analyzes the circumstances that justify a shift from the torts to the administrative approach to compensation, and how the two approaches should relate to each other. It addresses the issue of whether victims should have a right to choose between them in the disposition of their cases and, if so, under what conditions. Finally, it compares judicial to administrative compensation in relation to the goals a compensation program must pursue, and argues that even in those cases where administrative compensation offers the best option, it is advisable to leave room for the use of judicial compensation as well.

This paper assesses recent trends in international law regarding the availability and character of reparations. Presently, reparations issues have arisen particularly in domestic societies searching for transitional justice in the aftermath of authoritarian rule. These issues are shaped by national legal systems, but are also influenced by international practice. In these transitional settings, the search for justice is affected by political preoccupations such as the persistent influence of displaced prior authoritarian leadership as well as by real and alleged limitations on the financial capabilities of transitional states. No general approach can address the interplay between national and international law at this stage. Reliance must be placed on a case by case approach, considering matters of context such as the degree of suffering and disability inflicted on particular categories of claimants, the balance of claims versus the State’s demands for resources to fund sustainable and equitable development. Remoteness in time bears on the credibility of the claimants as present victims tend to be given priority over victims in the distant past when assessing relative merits. Scale and selectivity suggests that if the total of claims overwhelms the administrative capacity of the state, there will be a tendency to substitute apology and symbolic gestures for material ones, and award reparations based on individual need associated with the prior deprivation. International law informs background moral and political thinking about reparations, but practical considerations of capability and prudence are decisive in most instances, making the influence of international law indirect and sometimes marginal.

This paper focuses on the relationship between the individual (micro) and the collective (macro) dimensions of reparations, highlighting the gaps and confluences between the two by focusing on symbolic reparations. It argues that massive reparations programs leave a disparity between the individual and the collective dimensions of reparations, i.e., between the needs of victims dealing with extreme trauma, and the social and political needs of a transitional society. Through reparations, the victim seeks some sort of reparation, i.e., a psychological state in which they feel adequate amends have been made. However, whether reparation at an individual level has taken place is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain. The individual (psychological) and the collective (political) always stand in tension with one another when granting reparations. This dilemma is central to the reparations debate. It is argued that the gap between the micro and macro can be narrowed through a better understanding of the impact of extreme political trauma. Steps can be taken at the social and political level to potentially increase the impact of reparations on individuals as well as the context, process, and discourses surrounding their delivery.

Chapter 1 explains why a new interdisciplinary theoretical framework is necessary in order to explain the complexity of state transformation and foreign policy making when understanding a Muslim country’s engagement with European modernity. This is the first work within the literature of FPA that seeks to explain the role of foreign policy in modern nation-state building in relation to the candidate term ‘transitional’ states. After identifying the three pillars of the new framework - the study of foreign policy, transition to modernity and the ideology of nationalism – it explains why FPA has become the departing point of an interdisciplinary approach. The chapter then identifies the five main dimensions of foreign policy as a consequence of the transition to modernity in non-European societies.

This conclusion summarizes the book's main findings about the role of knowledge production and policy formation on the Kazak steppes of the Russian Empire. It highlights a strikingly common formulation among Kazak intermediaries of the long nineteenth century: the Kazak steppe and its inhabitants were in a “transitional state.” It shows that for Kazaks, the source of their problems lay in a variety of factors, from moral crisis to a failure of economic modernization, Europeanization, and the spread of a purified, modernist Islam. It also considers how mass peasant resettlement became the essential condition of tsarist policy on the steppe and how rapid resettlement affected Kazaks. Finally, it examines how bureaucrats and intermediaries who could envision many transitional states combined local and metropolitan knowledge in idiosyncratic ways to advance their views.

This chapter, which elaborates the understanding of state-dependent asymmetries, extends the notion of hemispheric asymmetry to altered states of consciousness such as sleep states. It notes that sleep seems to be a very multifaceted, complex behavioral state characterized by a very different brain activity during rapid eye movement, stage 1, stage 2, and slow wave sleep, as compared to waking. The chapter suggests that electroencephalography and behavioral data obtained from the sleep onset process display a greater alerting state in the right hemisphere when the brain is sleepy and is falling asleep. It then shows that alertness is compromised during some transitional states, as well as sleep onset and awakenings from sleep, but is particularly impaired during sleep deprivation.