United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice ─ Principles, Politics, and Pragmatics

In United States Law and Policy on Transitional Justice, Zachary D. Kaufman explores the motivations driving how and why individual states choose to help create, support, and participate in transitional justice institutions. By first presenting an overview of transitional justice options and the U.S. role in their development, and then analyzing six unique case studies, Kaufman evaluates why and how the United States has pursued particular transitional justice options (such as war crimes tribunals) in certain contexts.

This book challenges the "legalist" paradigm, which postulates that liberal states pursue war crimes tribunals because their decision-makers hold a principled commitment to the rule of law. Kaufman develops an alternative theory--"prudentialism"--which contends that any state--liberal or illiberal--may support bona fide war crimes tribunals. Prudentialism postulates that states will pursue transitional justice options, not out of strict adherence to certain principles, but as a result of a case-specific balancing of politics, pragmatics, and normative beliefs. Kaufman tests these two competing theories through the U.S. experience with four primary case studies-Germany and Japan after World War II as well as the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda after the Cold War-and two secondary case studies-the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the 1990-91 Iraqi offenses against Kuwaitis.

Zachary D. Kaufman is an International Security Fellow at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, a Visiting Fellow at both Yale Law School and Yale University's Genocide Studies Program, and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he taught in Yale University's Department of Political Science and George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, and he held fellowships or research positions at the U.S. Supreme Court, Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Dr. Kaufman is the editor of Social Entrepreneurship in the Age of Atrocities: Changing Our World (2012), co-editor (with Phil Clark) ofAfter Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond(Oxford, 2009), and author of dozens of articles and book chapters. He holds an MPhil and a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford (where he was a Marshall Scholar), a J.D. from Yale Law School (where he was an Olin Fellow and Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law & Policy Review), and a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University (where he was student body president).

Prior to academia, Dr. Kaufman served as the first American at the International Criminal Court. In addition, he worked at two other war crimes tribunals (the UN International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda), for a U.S. federal appellate judge, at the U.S. Departments of State and Justice, and in private practice.