One of the most widespread and least disputed ideas in the literature of transitional justice is the belief that transitional interventions (such as trials, truth commissions and reparations) are problem-solving interventions, concerned with the implementation of peace and justice in the wake of violence. The vast majority of works depart from an uncritical account of the production of knowledge that assumes a relation of exteriority between the field and practice of transitional justice and the problems faced by transitional societies. This logic identifies in a given (post-conflict) situation the need to implement one particular solution (justice, in all its different forms). Everything began when the trauma of the Holocaust required the creation of a new, unprecedented crime and the enforcement of an international duty to punish the enemies of humankind (solving the impossibility of philosophical and legal judgement); in the Southern Cone and in South Africa, the ‘trauma’ of state terror (the military dictatorships and apartheid) and the regime of silence that ensued required a different approach involving the creation of truth commissions (solving the problem of disappearances and the need for reconciliation); and, from the establishment of the ICC onwards, a common language of justice connected both responses (solving the dynamics of a new era defined by the pervasive existence of cultures of impunity). What is clear from this historical reading is that knowledge and practice are always seen as responses to something exterior to them. They represent a reaction to a reality that, in the first place, they do not create.

The first step towards developing a critical method is to realise the limits of this historical account. Adopting a historical method is not enough to produce an innovative reading of transitional justice. So long as the analysis remains at the level of conditions of implementation, the resulting depiction will likely reproduce a traditional image of the field. To move forward and beyond such image, we need to go back to the works of Michel Foucault, seriously incorporating what he defined as a critical historical method or a genealogy. Foucault was adamant about the need to question the conditions of possibility of both knowledge and practice. Through his genealogical insights, we can move away from the conditions of implementation of post-conflict or post-authoritarian justice towards an investigation of their conditions of possibility.