TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE TRIAL MECHANISMS AND AUTHORITARIANISM: DOMESTIC, INTERNATIONAL, AND HYBRID TRIAL MECHANISMS AND POTENTIAL LINKS TO INCREASES IN AUTHORITARIANISM IN TRANSITIONING STATES

Abstract

This paper will conduct a review of the field of transitional justice, with a focus on reviewing trial mechanisms at the local, national, and international levels in Rwanda, as well as in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This thesis seeks to understand if authoritarianism is linked to certain transitional justice mechanisms, specifically trial mechanisms. First, a literature review is conducted that reviews the academic literature of the field of transitional justice, trial mechanisms, and authoritarianism as well as relevant UN resolutions and publications, and international law and human rights civil society organizations publications. Then, an empirical evaluation will be conducted that examines the relationship between transitional justice mechanisms, and the level of authoritarianism and rule of law within states, as measured by the Polyarchy and Rule of Law Indices from Coppedge et.al (2019) Varieties of Democracy Dataset and the Binningsbø et al (2012) Post Conflict Justice Dataset.. This will then be compared between states in the trial mechanism group that underwent similar trial mechanisms, as well as between those states and Rwanda. The results of this thesis did not support two out of three hypotheses, specifically that domestic trial mechanisms lead to increased authoritarianism and that hybrid trial mechanisms lead to decreased authoritarianism. One hypothesis was upheld by the results of this thesis, that international trial mechanisms nave no discernable effect on the Rule of Law or Polyarchy indices for countries.