Gerhard Anders & Olaf Zenker 
Transition and Justice 
Negotiating the Terms of New Beginnings in Africa

Transition and Justice examines a series of cases from
across the African continent where peaceful ‘new
beginnings’ were declared after periods of violence and where
transitional justice institutions helped define justice and the new
socio-political order.

* Offers a new perspective on transition and justice in Africa
transcending the institutional limits of transitional justice

* Covers a wide range of situations, and presents a broad range
of sites where past injustices are addressed

* Examines cases where peaceful ‘new beginnings’ have
been declared after periods of violence

* Addresses fundamental questions about transitions and justice
in societies characterized by a high degree of external involvement
and internal fragmentation

Table of Content

Notes on Contributors vii

1 Transition and Justice: An Introduction 1
Gerhard Anders and Olaf Zenker

2 Making Good Citizens from Bad Life in Post-Genocide Rwanda 21
Simon Turner

3 Performing Repatriation? The Role of Refugee Aid in Shaping New Beginnings in Mauritania 41
Marion Fresia

4 Conflicting Logics of Exceptionality: New Beginnings and the Problem of Police Violence in Post-Apartheid South Africa 65
Steffen Jensen

5 The 2011 Toilet Wars in South Africa: Justice and Transition between the Exceptional and the Everyday after Apartheid 85
Steven Robins

6 New Law against an Old State: Land Restitution as a Transition to Justice in Post-Apartheid South Africa? 113
Olaf Zenker

7 Transitional Justice, States of Emergency and Business as Usual in Sierra Leone 135
Gerhard Anders

8 ‘When we Walk Out, What was it all About?’: Views on New Beginnings from within the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda 153
Nigel Eltringham

9 New Start or False Start? The ICC and Electoral Violence in Kenya 175
Sabine H¨ohn

10 Justice without Peace? International Justice and Conflict Resolution in Northern Uganda 199
Kimberley Armstrong

11 The Violence of Peace: Ethnojustice in Northern Uganda 219
Adam Branch

Index 241

About the author

Gerhard Anders is lecturer at the Centre of African
Studies, University of Edinburgh. He has conducted research on
the implementation of the good governance agenda, international
criminal justice and transitional justice in Africa. He is
co-editor of Corruption and the Secret of Law: A Legal
Anthropological Perspective (2007) and author
of In the Shadow of Good Governance: An Ethnography of
Civil Service Reform in Africa (2010).
Olaf Zenker is Junior Professor at the Institute of
Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. He
has done research on Irish language revivalism and ethnicity in
Northern Ireland and currently studies the moral modernity of the
new South African state in the context of its land restitution
process. He is the author of Irish/ness Is All Around Us:
Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern
Ireland (2013) and co-editor of The State and the
Paradox of Customary Law in Africa (2015).