Transitional Justice and Bystanders

In Transitional Justice and Bystanders: A Critical Approach to Moral Responsibility, Sanja Pesek examines the moral landscape of complicity during a time marked by state-sponsored violence and its aftermath. Moving beyond traditional ideas of guilt and innocence, the book redefines bystanders not just as passive witnesses but as active participants in maintaining injustice. It shows how ordinary citizens become ethically involved in mass violence, from the initial moral decline to later stages characterized by denial and silence and highlights the moral framework of ‘perverted group ethics’ that transforms civic belonging into complicity.

Breaking new theoretical ground, the study develops the concept of the criminal social contract to describe how authoritarian and populist regimes recode universal moral norms into group-exclusive ideologies. Drawing on normative ethics, political theory, and international criminal jurisprudence, the book expands existing taxonomies of bystanderhood by introducing new categories, such as unethical adversaries and transitional bystanders, that reveal the complex continuum between participation and denial. Through this lens, shared moral responsibility emerges as the most effective model for understanding complicity in modern populist criminal regimes. Ultimately, Transitional Justice and Bystanders argues that transitional justice cannot succeed without confronting the collective moral failures that persist long after the guns fall silent. It envisions a transformative, diachronic moral framework capable of regenerating equality and accountability in post-atrocity societies.

Transitional Justice and Bystanders is an essential resource for scholars and students of law, transitional justice, genocide studies, and political science. Human rights lawyers and peace campaigners will similarly benefit from its innovative approach to post-atrocity environments.