When Historical Commissions Meet Transitional Justice: Overlooked Synergies, New Opportunities and Emerging concerns

The expansion in the field of transitional justice to aparadigmatic contexts—where no explicit political transition has occurred—has introduced a wider range of tools and mechanisms. One prominent example is the growing use of state-sanctioned historical commissions to examine the colonial past, often drawing on the logic and rhetoric of the transitional justice framework. While this expansion has made the connection between transitional justice and historical commissions more explicit, their relationship is not a new phenomenon. Historical commissions are established to investigate the origins, development, and legacy of historical events at the centre of competing narratives and memories of the past, which generate social and political unrest in the present and fuel instability and even outbreaks of violence. While historical commissions originated outside of the paradigm of transitional justice its increasing adoption of its rhetoric and logic has sparked significant debates regarding the value of different types of historical interpretation in processes of coming to terms with the past. These debates examine the sociopolitical implications of such processes and the role of state-sponsored institutions—such as historical commissions—in producing historical discourses, creating meta-narratives, and shaping memory regimes that ‘construct or reinforce’ specific representations of the past. Despite their growing interaction with the field of transitional justice, historical commissions have largely remained at its margins, with this intersection often going unnoticed. This paper focus on explaining why the synergies between the two paradigms have been overlooked and identifies opportunities and elements of concern emerging from this relationship. This presentation draws from a recently published chapter in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict.