The Third Way in Transitional Justice: Parsing Out Accountability and Impunity within Colombia's Innovative Special Jurisdiction for the Peace

Having undergone a number of transitional justice (TJ) processes, Colombia proves to be a key leading testing ground in the development of more equitable and transformative legal and political institutions. As such lessons from its past may yield crucial advancements for transitional justice and peacekeeping globally. In particular, the Special Jurisdiction of the Peace (SJP) created in 2016 represents a new era of TJ projects, ones with greater transformational and (re)constructive aims, which attempt to address and redress past failures in the traditional forms of these projects. As such the present work aims to analyze the SJP's governing structure in order to better elucidate some of the concrete (eg. poor perceptions, highly bureaucratic) and theoretical (eg. over-reliance on 'truth' within TJ) challenges that have arisen from its ambitious project to ensure truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition for victims. Crucially, this work addresses the types of accountability and impunity it generates (whether general or specific, national or individual) while simultaneously distilling the characteristics of a model for more transformative future TJ projects.