Travel, Dilemmas and Nonrecurrence: Observations on the ‘Respectabilisation’ of Transitional Justice Kieran McEvoy* INTRODUCTION While transitional justice has only emerged as a recognizable field of inquiry in the last two to three decades, it has rapidly acquired all of the elements of what Emmanuelle Picard has termed ‘respectabilisation.’ 1 With my colleague Louise Mallinder I recently co-edited a ‘greatest hits’ of transitional justice running to four volumes, 62 chapters and over 1,500 pages. 2 Our most significant challenge – apart from the inevitably subjective test of what to include or exclude – was the sheer vol- ume of articles and book chapters which we (genuinely) enjoyed reviewing. Academics from fields as diverse as law, anthropology, international relations, phil- osophy, criminology, psychology, history and many others self-identify as working in the field of transitional justice. There are numerous books and articles, two specialist journals, a number of book series, major research grants and all the other trappings that speak to academic respectability. In the world of policy and practice, it is a field with its own UN special rapporteur. The World Bank, the European Union, the African Union and other international players as well as domestic politicians and pol- icy makers appear to take transitional justice seriously. In addition, there has been a significant institutionalization of transitional justice. In the legal world, the expenditure on transitional justice-related work is quite extra- ordinary. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the International Criminal Court and the hybrid tribunals in Sierra Leone, East Timor and Cambodia have collectively cost billions of dollars. 3 Rule of law programmes are a key component of much * School of Law and Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queens University Belfast. Email: k.mcevoy@qub.ac.uk 1 Emmanuelle Picard, ‘Une Discipline en Voie de Respectabilisation: La Germanistique Franc ¸aise au Milieu du XXe Sie `cle,’ Lendemains 103–104 (2002): 68–78. 2 Kieran McEvoy and Louise Mallinder, eds., Transitional Justice: Critical Concepts in Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 3 William Schabas, Unimaginable Atrocities: Justice, Politics, and Rights at the War Crimes Tribunals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Klaus Bachmann and Aleksandar Fati  c, The UN International Criminal Tribunals: Transition without Justice? (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015); Charles Jalloh, ed., The Sierra Leone Special Court and Its Legacy: The Impact for Africa and International Criminal Law (New York: Cambridge V C The Author(s) (2018). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email journals.permissions@oup.com  185 International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2018, 12, 185–193 doi: 10.1093/ijtj/ijy013 Editorial Note Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ijtj/article-abstract/12/2/185/5045702 by guest on 17 June 2020