Transitional justice (TJ) scenarios are those where a society is moving from war to peace or from authoritarianism to democracy. Whether explicit or implicit, a key goal of TJ is to balance the need to atone for past abuses of human rights with the need to create the conditions for social and political stability in the future, and this requires avoiding forms of “victor’s justice” whereby one system of oppression is simply replaced with another. TJ questions, then, are not merely about justice, but about justice and prudence: not merely whom to punish and by what authority, but to what ends (Arthur 2009: 323). These ends, according to de Greiff (2012), are reconciliation and democratization, as well as the rebuilding of civic trust and the recognition of victims.
The dilemma becomes, therefore, whether the emphasis on legality and punishment is or should be the sole mechanism of TJ or, as Roht-Arriaza (2006: 1) suggests, more emphasis should be placed on education, identities, and culture. Many TJ contexts have sociolinguistic dimensions, particularly where linguistic repression has been a cipher for broader political repression, and where abuses of human rights have been linked to abuses of language-based rights. In this paper, I argue that language policy reform is and has been empirically a crucial site for the operation of TJ, but that the relationship between the two has so far been undertheorized. I thus present a theoretical framework of TJ-focused language policy, which is applied broadly to a number of case studies, including Sri Lanka, South Africa, and – in particular – Taiwan. I conclude by calling for scholars to further develop this framework, so that it can be used by activists and TJ practitioners in real-world contexts.
References
Arthur, P. (2009). How “transitions” reshaped human rights: A conceptual history of transitional justice. Human Rights Quarterly, 31, 321–367
de Greiff, P. (2012). Theorizing transitional justice. Nomos, 51, 31–77.
Roht-Arriaza, N. (2006). The new landscape of transitional justice. In N. Roht-Arriaza & J. Mariezcurrena (Eds.), Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
