Transitional justice and reconciliation from the international peace-building perspectiveRemzije Istrefi

In the last decades, international actors have played an influential and catalytic role in facilitating justice and reconciling divided societies through post-conflict peacebuilding missions. Peacebuilding missions not only provide an intermediary role between former enemies but have become an effective participant in activities that form part of the mechanisms of transitional justice. In doing so, these actors take on the role of a ‘moral agent’ which very often lacks political trust and trust responsiveness. The objective of this article is to review theoretical critiques on the practice of peacebuilding missions in transitional justice processes and to evaluate their contribution to shaping the concept of reconciliation. It will analyse the effect of such critiques and discuss whether the existing theoretical criticism fundamentally changes the dominant concepts of transitional justice or if there is a potential requirement for the absorption of this criticism into the existing corpus of knowledge in the field as a way of advancing the development of international peacebuilding activities.