The Prospects for Transitional Justice in Catalyzing Socioeconomic Justice in Postconflict States: A Critical Assessment in Light of Somalia’s Transition

There is an increasing belief in transitional justice literature that transitional justice can and should assist the transformation of oppressed societies into fair ones by exposing and remedying the discriminatory practices and violations of economic, social, and cultural rights that led to conflict. This would facilitate a deeper and more substantive justice than the field’s traditional concentration on civil and political rights has hitherto allowed for. This demand is based on an assumption that transition to democracy automatically conduces to a dramatic revision of exploitative socioeconomic structures and a more distributive conception of justice, provided that transitional justice mechanisms are designed holistically to achieve these ends. However, this assumption is questionable in ostensibly transitional states where potential spoilers have the means and motivation to retain the gains of conflict, on the one hand, and where there is widespread antipathy to the type of strong state that could make distributive transitional justice a reality, on the other. Somalia offers the paradigmatic example of a precarious transition to a state where (a) the economic interests of various factions may operate to preclude national consensus on addressing the socioeconomic justice that motivated, exacerbated, and flowed from the conflict, and (b) there is significant opposition to the construction of a state strong enough to coordinate equitable development or redistribution.