Gender and Transitional Justice: Explaining Global Trends

In this article, we explore historical trends in gender-attentive transitional justice policies using a new global dataset of truth commissions, prosecutions and reparations policies. We find that gender was largely absent from these policies from 1970 through 1990 but that more attention to gender began in the 1990s and has been sustained since that time. Initial attention to gender focused primarily on violence against women; more recently, some limited attention to broader understandings of gender that include men, boys and LGBTQI+ individuals has started to appear. We argue that the early efforts of feminist activists in countries both in the Global North and the Global South to frame and set the global agenda on violence against women shaped when transitional justice policies became gender attentive and how these policies have diffused across countries. We argue that attention to female victims and physical gender violence is associated with a positive spillover, leading to broader attention to gender issues rather than crowding out attention to other gender harms.