Evaluating the Evaluators: Transitional Justice and the Contest of Values

Despite an increase in scholarly efforts to evaluate transitional justice (TJ) programmes,
there is little agreement over what TJ is, what effects it could be expected to
have or how TJ mechanisms should be judged. This article contributes to the literature
on TJ evaluation by showing how differences in understanding of the nature and value
of the ‘justice’ in TJ affect what is evaluated and how findings are interpreted. The article
parses the values inherent in TJ evaluations (retributive, restorative and transformative
justice, valuable for intrinsic or instrumental reasons) in order to think
through the ways in which different value orientations lead to different appraisals.
A broad sample of literature on the TJ programme in Sierra Leone is analyzed according
to the value orientations it tends towards. The analysis finds that evaluations of
Sierra Leonean TJ can be found displaying each of the six value orientations, with no
agreement about the success of the TJ programme from within orientations, let alone
across them. Additionally, it is argued that scholars and researchers are rarely explicit
about their orientations, and there is insufficient consideration of the political implications
of different value positions for prescriptions for future TJ programmes.