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The Transitional Justice and Foreign Policy Nexus: The Inefficient Causation of State Ontological Security-Seeking

Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: How does an approach towards transitional justice produce preconditions for a country's international action, enabling certain policies and practices in the immediate neighborhood and international society at large? This article unpacks ontological security-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics, which makes it possible to productively conceptualize the connection between a state's transitional justice and foreign policies. Going beyond the dichotomy of transitional justice compliance and noncompliance by gauging the role of states’ subjective sense of self in driving their behavior, I develop an analytical framework to explain how state ontological security-seeking relates to major transitions and consequent state identity disjuncture, the ensuing politics of truth-and-justice-seeking, and its international resonance in framing and executing particular foreign policies. I offer a typology of the international consequences of states’ transitional justice politics, distinguishing between reflective and mnemonical security-oriented approaches, spawning cooperative and conflictual foreign policy behavior, respectively. The empirical purchase of the purported nexus is illustrated with the example of post-Soviet Russia's limited politics of accountability toward the repressions of its antecedent regime and its increasingly self-assertive and confrontational stance in contemporary international politics.
DOI: 10.1093/isr/viy006
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,320
OpenAlex ID: W2784199609
FWCI: 10.8
Cites: 141
Cited by: 32
Related to: 10