Building Peace: Transitional Justice in the Early Modern World

How to reconcile former enemies in the wake of civil conflict and prevent a return to violence? Transitional justice has become a ubiquitous concept for understanding peacebuilding in the modern world. This conference approaches the early modern period as a particularly productive field for the wider study of peacebuilding and transitional justice. How exactly did post-war societies before the modern age deal with the challenge of peacebuilding? What particular transitional justice strategies did they develop? And how effective were they in achieving peace and reconciliation, either on a local or national level? As such, this conference aims to evaluate how the study of transitional justice can reshape our understanding of the early modern world – not just as a period of incessant conflict, but also a laboratory for peacebuilding efforts.