Coding amnesty as transitional justice smuggles a contested moral judgment into quantitative data.

Evidence

The concept and literature on “transitional justice” deals directly with normative issues of “crime,” “wrongdoing,” and the like. The During Conflict Justice data set focuses exclusively on “justice” as crimes or wrongdoings related to the events of a particular conflict. The data set includes information on six forms of addressing wrongdoing: trials, truth commissions and commissions of inquiry, reparations, amnesties, purges, and exiles (Loyle and Binningsbø 2018, 445). It is not at all obvious that amnesty is justice, even though it is included in data sets on transitional justice. Typically, amnesty means that justice is not being served. So to include amnesty in the concept of transitional justice is to make a clear—and in my opinion completely invalid—normative decision. The United Nations takes the same stance in refusing to include amnesty in its list of standard and approved transitional justice mechanisms (United Nations Secretary General 2010). — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts and Measurement, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s work on extralegal dispute resolution (diamond bourse arbitration) where what counts as ‘justice’ is defined by the community, not a court.
• SEED: Angle: “Amnesty Isn’t Justice” — how the name of a dataset quietly decides a moral question that societies are still fighting over.