Cultural Rights and Wrongs in Transitional Justice

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book interrogates the role of cultural rights in the transitional justice project. For much of the field’s history, transitional justice has marginalized cultural rights. This has positioned cultural rights on the periphery of the transitional justice field. Although several factors contribute to the marginalization of cultural rights, it can primarily be traced to certain conceptual constraints that developed during the field’s evolutionary history and which are now embedded in a dominant model of transitional justice. This dominant model is characterized by an exceedingly narrow construction of three core concepts central to transitional justice: transition, justice, and violence. This book retheorizes these three core concepts in ways that empower transitional justice to respect, protect, and address cultural rights in more meaningful ways. Unmoored from its initial conceptual boundaries, transitional justice has the flexibility to respect cultural rights, confront large-scale cultural rights violations, and empower cultural interventions in the wake of mass harm. This has the potential to strengthen the normative value of cultural rights, address root causes of conflict, respond to survivor priorities, and shape more meaningful long-term reforms. The book concludes by articulating and advancing a cultural rights-based approach to transitional justice, drawing on practice in disparate post-conflict and divided societies to demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of such an approach. Specific attention is afforded to the cultural rights of Indigenous Peoples, groups who often endure endemic cultural harm and who tend to prioritize the redress of cultural right violations and cultural responses in ensuing transitional justice programming.</jats:p>