This chapter offers a pluralist reading of transitional justice built around three meanings of pluralism. The first is value pluralism – the idea, dear to Isaiah Berlin, that values are irreducibly manifold, potential conflicting and frequently incommensurable in such a way that they cannot be ranked or weighed on any single scale. The second meaning of pluralism is cultural pluralism. It refers to the fact that there are many different cultures, many different collective ways of life, none of which can claim superiority. While insisting on the possibility of a cross-cultural conversation around core values, the proposed pluralist approach rejects the normal model’s tendency to reduce transitional justice to one set of (Western) cultural forms. The third form of pluralism briefly considered is legal pluralism, meaning the coexistence of competing legal orders. Discussing Rwanda’s experience with the so-called gacaca courts, the chapter suggests a pluralist understanding of the rule of law flexible enough to accommodate cultural variation while remaining committed to what I take to be its universal core. The chapter ends by proposing a pluralist method for thinking about transitional justice, which is linked to basic commitments referred to as sense of reality, anti-monism, situated thinking, decolonised cosmopolitanism and fallibilistic mentality. The chapter argues that these commitments can help mitigate a number of problematic trends in contemporary transitional justice discourse and practice.

In the 20th century, some thinkers, like Paul Ramsey, tried to reestablish the older, explicitly religious foundations for just war thought. Others, like Michael Walzer, did the opposite, trying to found just war on felt the moral intuition of liberalism. Both sought to amend the Westphalian order to make greater room for human rights or the sanctity of human life, which marks the beginning of the Liberal tradition of just war thinking. Ramsey approached the subject from an explicitly theological perspective but still supported key Liberal tenets, like democracy, human rights, and the “international common good.” Ramsey’s emphasis on love as the cornerstone of just war meant human life was an absolute value, more important than Westphalian sovereignty. Walzer was more explicit about his liberalism, but he built it on weaker foundations. He sought to amend the Westphalian tradition to allow for intervention for humanitarian purposes, a position he strengthened in later work, but he also maintained a preference for national self-determination without concern for ideology or regime type that was in tension with his commitment to human rights.

Chapter 6 revises two of the shortcomings from which the inevitable conflict thesis suffers. First, the inevitable conflict thesis claims that military necessity and humanity in their material context never coincide. On the contrary, there are numerous instances where a belligerent act is both humane and necessary, or both inhumane and unnecessary, as the case may be. Second, according to the inevitable conflict thesis, both military necessity and humanity generate imperatives. For the purposes of IHL norm-creation, however, there is simply no reason why materially necessary acts should be performed, or why materially unnecessary ones should be avoided. This shows that military necessity is normatively indifferent. Although humanity generates imperatives in many cases, it also remains indifferent in others.

Aristotle valued small associations more than today’s liberals: he considered villages, fraternal organizations and guilds to be civic friendships in their own right. He criticized utopian theories such as Plato’s Republic for quixotically attempting to destroy associations. In liberal democracies, associations formed to tackle causes reproduce some of the advantages of the small polis: in such associations, each member acts in view of his fellow citizens, and thus is influenced by the moral suasion of the group. Each perceives the influence he exercises, seeing the local impact of his power and taking ownership of incremental social change. Rethinking associations as civic friendships runs up against the problem of involuntary associations with their “solidarity and hostility.” Michael Walzer would correct liberalism’s deracinating tendencies by incentivizing us to remain in our involuntary identity groups. But his plan to channel government benefits through such groups would compromise the groups he means to help. To break the stranglehold of the bad associations—lobbies—to clear space for good associations, Congressional reforms are needed.