Reflections of the nexus between justice and peacebuilding

This commentary reflects on eight articles recently published in this journal as part of a special issue on the nexus between transitional justice and statebuilding (Volume 10, Issue 3, 2016). It positions the special issue within an emerging ‘fourth phase’ literature on transitional justice that draws on critiques of liberal peacebuilding to urge an expansion of its boundaries to embrace socio-economic issues. It is argued that the type of analysis found in the special issue, characterized by in-depth, on-the-ground empirical analysis of complex domestic politics of material accumulation and ideological contestation, marks a significant and welcome advance in a literature which to this point has been largely de-contextualized, exhortatory and over-reliant on tired binaries of the ‘international and the local’ or the ‘liberal and legitimate’.