Transitional justice for the “war on terror?”

Abstract More than 20 years after the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing “war on terror,” there is still very little comprehension of what its transitional justice implications might be. This article interrogates the transitional justice silence over the legacies of the war on terror as a way of problematizing both the war on terror and dominant liberal transitional justice paradigms. It charts how both paradigms have often failed to intersect, how some existing initiatives might nonetheless be understood as arising at their intersection, and the sort of questions that would need to be answered to frame a broad and ambitious transitional justice agenda to deal with the legacies of both terrorism and the response to it.