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Introduction: Justice in Democratic Transition and Consolidation
Justice has become an increasingly important issue for many newly
democratized countries (NDCs)
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-- both as scholarly inquiry and as policy choice.
It is key to a NDC’s success in reconciling its ignominious past, establishing its
legitimacy among citizens, and enhancing its prospect of sustaining democracy.
Reaching sweeping generalizations on the relationship between justice and democracy
across NDCs is not easy. Some scholars have cogently argued that the precise role
that justice plays in each NDC depends on the context.
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Nevertheless, it is useful to make some general statements by distinguishing
the various phases of democratization and how justice can play an important part in
each phase. First, the handling of justice is crucial to the success of the process of
transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. An emergent literature has dealt
with the issue of “transitional justice” from theoretical and comparative perspectives.
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This paper defines NDCs as those countries in East Asia, Latin America, and
Eastern Europe that underwent democratic transitions in the late 1980s-early 1990s.
Although generally considered to belong in the cohort known as Third Wave
democracies (Huntington 1991), the NDCs differed from the more established “new
democracies” like Spain and Portugal in that many of them did not ever have a history
with democracy and that they are more likely to score in the low-end of the “free”
category of nations, as tracked by the Freedom House – that is, their combined
averages of political rights and civil liberties are more likely to be around 2, whereas
the averages for older Third Wave democracies are usually 1 or 1.5 (Freedom House
classifies nations with a combined score from 1-2.5 as “free,” 3-5.5 as “partly free,”
and 5.5-7 as “not free.” See Freedom House (2003).
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For a cross-national comparison on the relationship between justice and democracy,
see Bontekoe and Stepaniants (1997).
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For theoretical discussions of transitional justice, see Teitel (2000) and Kritz (1995).
Convention