What Internationals Know: Improving the Effectiveness of Post-Conflict Justice Initiatives

The international community is intensely involved in the field of post-conflict justice. The United States, the United Nations, and many other international organizations, governments, and institutions have contributed to hundreds of trials and programs aimed at achieving post-conflict justice goals.Through these initiatives, the field of post-conflict justice has developed rapidly over the last thirty years. This Article contributes to the literature on the effectiveness of post conflict justice initiatives by examining the relationships between internationals’ job movement and their development and transfer of knowledge from one post-conflict setting and institution to another. During interviews with internationals, I observed differences in how internationals in rule of law and international criminal law described the dynamics of job movement and knowledge-related processes in their areas of work.

In this Article, by examining these divergences, I identify factors that influence internationals’ development and use of knowledge. These factors include the types of knowledge that are regarded as most critical for the work, the nature of the work, the degree of similarity among the relevant institutions and post-conflict states, and the amount of contextualization to local settings that is required, among other features.