Write On! Impact of transitional justice

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.) The International Journal for Transitional Justice invites submissions for its 2010 special issue.
Entitled “Transitional Justice on Trial: Evaluating its Impact,” the issue's to be guest-edited by Colleen Duggan, Senior Program Specialist with the Evaluation Unit of the International Development Research Centre, Canada.
The call states in part:

The fact of the matter is that transitional justice – often controversial and always laden with political risks – is badly in need of an objective knowledge base that tells the impact story.
[W]e would like to delve more deeply into the impact dilemma currently being faced by those with a stake in the outcomes of transitional justice policies and practices. Just as evidence can be found in multiple and often unexpected places, we encourage the submission of theoretical, practical and policy-oriented papers from a broad spectrum of disciplines: law, sociology, anthropology, psychology, criminology, evaluation research, international relations and economics, among others. We encourage submissions from north and south-based authors. We welcome inputs from academics, from practitioners who have engaged in assessing the impact of their interventions, or other stakeholders who have reflected systematically on these
issues.

Among topics suggested:
► State of knowledge about the effects – either positive or negative – of transitional justice
► Methods of inquiry to be used for evaluating the impact of transitional justice
► Potential pitfalls and promise of specific methods
► Evaluation case studies
► Cross-disciplinary approaches
► Experimental designs
► Challenges of conducting evaluation
► Ethical dilemmas faced by researchers and evaluators
► Relationship (if any) between transitional justice and larger processes for social and political transformation
► Making of transitional justice policy
► Role (if any) of evidence of impact
► Tensions and trade-offs locally, nationally or internationally
► Integration of monitoring and evaluative thinking into transitional justice mechanisms
The deadline for submissions is April 1, 2010. Papers should be submitted online here. More information is available from the Managing Editor at ijtj@csvr.org.za.