Transitional Justice after BlackLivesMatter: A Comparative Case Study of Truth Commissions for Racial Justice.

Abstract

In the summer 2020, “BlackLivesMatter” demonstrations led to the largest civil unrest across the U.S. since the civil rights movement. Campaigners protested against the disproportionate number of killings and arrests of black Americans by the police. These protests brought to light the issue of institutional racism, i.e., hidden forms of racism that permeate American society and are embedded in law and policy.

Truth commissions are increasingly used to deal with issues of racial justice. Such commissions are a mechanism of transitional justice, a holistic and restorative approach to justice whereby societies seek to come to terms with a legacy of serious human rights abuses. Given the petitioning for establishing a truth commission for racial justice after the “BlackLivesMatter” protests, this thesis investigates whether truth commissions provide the adequate tools to address institutional racism. Its main objective is to investigate whether truth commissions improve legislative reforms in the U.S. This thesis therefore seeks to answer the following research question: do truth commissions have a measurable impact on government policy and legislative change? Very few studies have attempted to measure the impacts of truth commissions on legal reforms. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to identify and explain the causal mechanisms through which truth commissions (supposedly) drive legislative reforms.

To do so, it undertakes a comparative case study of selected truth commissions tasked with issues of racial justice and process-traces their operations. This thesis employs a “root cause” theoretical framework. It finds that truth commissions, which conduct more sophisticated analyses of the root causes of racialized inequalities, understood as investigations into how laws, policies and practices leading to the unfair treatment of people of color have developed and persisted, exert direct influence on policymakers and generate better legal reforms. By contrast, this thesis argues that truth commissions, which solely focus on the individual allocation of guilt, rarely generate legal reforms.