Generally, transitional justice can be defined as a procedure of provision of justice (not a type of justice) in extraordinary situations, aimed at dealing with resentments generated by large-scale violence. The “transitional” element of the concept refers to the situations of political flux, when a political community is forced to operate outside of the existing institutional framework (usually, these are transitions from one political regime to another, or from war to peace). Under such circumstances, “ordinary” institutions designed to provide justice (the ones we think about in our everyday life) may appear to be not enough. This opens the way for transitional justice, which requires establishing new rules and procedures and, as a result, inevitably contains some amount of politics.
