Gender and Transitional Justice: Explaining Global Trends
Abstract
In this article, we explore historical trends in gender-attentive transitional justice policies using a new global dataset of truth commissions, prosecutions, and reparations policies. We find that gender was largely absent from TJ from 1970 through 1990 but that more attention to gender began in the 1990s and has been sustained since that time. Initial attention to gender focused primarily on violence against women, but more recently, some limited attention to broader understandings of gender that include men, boys, and LGBTQI+ individuals have started to appear. We argue that the early efforts of feminist activists in countries both in the Global North and the Global South to frame and set the global agenda on violence against women subsequently shaped both when transitional justice policies became gender-attentive and how these policies have diffused across countries.