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Throughout 2025, ICTJ’s experts offered thoughtful analysis on conflicts and major political developments in more than 10 countries as part of the World Report newsletter. Their insightful commentaries shed light on the obstacles that victims, civil society, and their partners must navigate as they pursue sustainable peace and justice. In this edition, we look back on the past year through the Expert’s Choice column.

Customary justice is the primary way in which most communities in South Sudan resolve disputes. Its ability, however, to deal with massive human rights violations is limited due to the complexity of intercommunal violence and a lack of clarity on its proper role. This report contends ...

A man stands facing a table around which several men are seated.

In countries where state institutions have limited reach, customary and informal justice is often the most common way in which people resolve disputes and seek justice. Given its prominence, it is considered to be an important element of a people-centered approach to building peaceful, just, and inclusive societies. An understanding of the relationship between customary justice and transitional justice, however, remains underdeveloped. A new ICTJ report provides valuable empirical, qualitative research on the topic, in the context of South Sudan.

On June 5 and 6, 2024, the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU) hosted the fourth edition of the AU-EU Experts’ Seminar on Transitional Justice in Brussels, Belgium. The consortium implementing the Initiative for Transitional Justice in Africa, led by ICTJ, helped organize the event. The seminar explored how transitional processes can transform individual lives, societal relations, and dysfunctional state institutions.

Five years ago, in August 2018, to mark his 100 days in office, Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan addressed a large rally in Yerevan’s Republic Square to officially announce his government’s intentions to incorporate transitional justice mechanisms into Armenian post-revolution reform agenda. Since then, Armenia has been pursuing a range of transitional justice initiatives alongside other democratic reforms, and it has made some limited headway, despite setbacks and major challenges including renewed conflict with Azerbaijan.

In a fast-changing world, ICTJ regularly reexamines and adapts its methodology to develop innovative solutions to emerging problems, advance its mission, and achieve justice for victims of human rights violations. In that spirit, ICTJ recently launched an exciting new website and newsletter design. After over a year of research, planning, surveying stakeholders, designing, and testing, we unveiled a site that better aligns with what ICTJ and transitional justice are today.

ICTJ is more than two decades old. At the time it was established, many of those who contributed to transitions in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, South Africa, and the former Yugoslavia saw the value of a specialized organization that could draw from diverse national experiences to prov...

The cover of a report with the text, "2022-2027, Strategic Plan," with an image of people embracing underneath.

Throughout 2022, ICTJ’s experts weighed in on breaking news in more than 10 countries, offering incisive analyses of the political dynamics behind the coverage and the implications for justice, peace, and the rights of victims. In this December edition of the World Report, we look back at the year that was through our Expert’s Choice commentaries, bringing you all of our team’s valuable insights together in one place.

At a time when truth-seeking and reparations initiatives are taking hold across the United States, this report offers reflections from various civil society-led truth-seeking processes. Drawing on case studies from the United States, Colombia, Scotland, and West Papua, the report iden...

People gather around a plaque marking the Greenboro Massacre outside during an inaugural ceremony

On Thursday, January 13, 2022, the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany, convicted Anwar Raslan, a senior official in the Syrian government, for crimes against humanity. The landmark trial, the first ever to prosecute a member of Bashar al-Assad’s regime for such crimes, highlights a crucial component without which Raslan would never have been convicted: the role of victims in achieving justice.