To punish or to forgive perpetrators of mass atrocity? This question was, for a long time, described as the central dilemma of transitional justice. Since the beginnings of the field in the late twentieth century (1980s–1990s), the dilemma has been there, animating the writings of advocates of criminal accountability and the counter-arguments of those in favour of alternative forms of justice. But things have changed. The difficult choice between punishment and reconciliation does not seem to hold sway in the twenty-first century. Nowadays, it is widely accepted within transitional justice circles that responses to systematic violence require multifaceted, complex approaches involving both punishment and forgiveness; that truth commissions are no longer replacements for trials; that reconciliation cannot be based on blanket or bargained amnesties. The dilemma, we are told, belongs to history.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an introductory account of the historical transformation of the punishment vs impunity debates, from an intractable choice between punishment and forgiveness in the wake of mass atrocities to the present-day synthesis. Its central objective is to trace and explain the developments of the twenty-first-century ‘common language of justice’ that works as the guiding principle of transitional or post-conflict justice. Avoiding the temptation to treat the punishment vs impunity debates as a technocratic question, I address the debates from the perspective of political struggles that first inspired the scholarship and practice of transitional justice. This is done in hope of reconnecting the ideas and policies that scholars have exhaustively discussed on paper to the political commitments they invite in practice; to the politics that first stimulated the emergence of transitional justice but were later obfuscated as the practice was mainstreamed into a set of global responses to systematic violence. Furthermore, as an exercise of historical contextualisation, this chapter provides the first step towards a new, critically inspired reading of transitional justice.

The chapter begins by investigating the appearance of a global antiimpunity movement in the context of democratic transitions in the Global South (roughly from the 1970s to the 1990s). It is hard to overstate the importance of this ‘movement’ in the process of institutionalisation of transitional justice. At first, a transnational, disjointed and heterogeneous alliance between activists, intellectuals, legal practitioners and policymakers worked in a support capacity to direct and indirect victims of state terror.