Transitional Societies and Corrective Mechanisms

According to Colleen ^{Murphy (2015)}, there are four background conditions most TJ scholars agree identify a society as transitional: 1) pervasive structural injustice, 2) collective and political wrongdoing, 3) moderately severe existential uncertainty and 4) fundamental uncertainty about authority (8-9). Case studies can be found throughout the TJ literature, the most common of which address transitions in post-Apartheid South Africa, post-civil war Guatemala, and post-Mubarak Egypt.

In what ^{Balasco (2013b)} calls the "first wave of transitional justice," TJ scholars and human rights practitioners focused their energies on designing mechanisms to enable a country to transition from dictatorship to democracy. The operative question was, "What mechanisms need to be in place to address past human rights violations in order to transition to a democratic state?" (p. 200). After the conflict and during the transitional period, mechanisms to promote justice -such as legal trials, truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, lustrations, and memorials- are initiated by the regime or a neutral party to bring closure to a chapter of violence and repression in a country's history.⁴ Forgiveness, recognition, peace-making, and the restoration of victims' sense of dignity feature strongly in TJ mechanisms (^{Andrieu, 2010}; ^{Oettler, 2017}).

TJ's Goals and Measuring Outcomes

Defining TJ is no easy task, simply because the research agenda encompasses so many diverse goals.⁵ Goals of TJ, as stated in the literature, include: 1) Stopping human rights violations; 2) identifying human rights violators; 3) conducting investigations of claimed human rights abuses; 4) enabling national, group, and individual reconciliation; 5) punishing wrongdoers, including private citizens and state actors; 6) compensating victims of state repression and state-sanctioned violence; 7) anticipating and preventing future violence and repression; and 8) reforming institutions that undermine a just, democratic social order.⁶ Some scholars judge the vagueness of TJ's goals as problematic for measuring its impact (^{Balasco, 2013b}, ^{Call, 2004}).

Although TJ has a strongly normative orientation, it is also a research program devoted to empirical and comparative studies of country conflicts and regimes in transition. According to ^{Balasco (2013b)}, in the early 2000s, TJ scholars were "confronted with an existential question: Does transitional justice accomplish what it was intended to fulfil?" In order to address this pivotal question, inquirers had to determine not only which outcomes of implementing TJ mechanisms to measure, but also how best to measure them - anecdotally, through rigorous data analysis, genealogical narratives, etc. Some, for instance, investigated how reparations were distributed using quantitative methods, including polls and random sampling (^{De Greiffe, 2009}). Others examined the exclusion of women from TJ mechanisms by employing qualitative techniques, such as ethnographic interviews (^{Ross, 2010}). Leading scholars in the TJ research program have called for more rigor and "evidence-based evaluations" to counteract demands by state and non-state perpetrators of violence to demand the same remedies and deferential treatment as the victims of injustice (^{Borzutsky 2017}; ^{Collins, 2010}; ^{Olsen et al., 2010}; ^{Uprimny & Saffron, 2006}; ^{Wiebelhaus-Brahm, 2010}).

Remedying the Field's Under-Theorization

In its early years (1980s and 1990s), TJ was a policy-oriented research program with little scholarly investment in the development of theory (^{Kritz 1995}). Most theory was borrowed from more theory oriented sub-disciplines, such as political philosophy and political theory. With time (early 2000s), TJ became more praxis-oriented, targeted at country studies and projects to build peace and promote post-conflict reconciliation. It became obvious that TJ's weakness was its undertheorization. Lund and McGovern (2008) criticized the small body of extant TJ theory for being both undertheorized and ethnocentric, based predominantly on a westernized, liberal notion of justice, wed to a teleology of democratization.

By the mid-2000s, TJ scholars began to remedy the research program's undertheorization problem. The first volume of essays exclusively addressing the theorization of TJ appeared in the following decade (^{Buckley-Zistel et al., 2014}). Nevertheless, many of the program's theories ofjustice remained parasitic, rather than freestanding, relying on previously developed theories, especially the dominant Rawlsian approach in justice studies. Colleen ^{Murphy (2017)} has made strides in establishing a theory of transitional justice that differs from traditional theories of corrective, retributive, and distributive justice. TJ is distinctive, she argues, insofar as it presumes the full breakdown of rule of law and judicial mechanisms; whereas the other kinds of justice occur within a stable, functioning democracies, featuring only minimal structural injustice, little or no collective wrongdoing, a small degree of existential uncertainty, and isolated cases of vagueness about legal authority (^{Murphy, 2016}).

Broadening the Research Agenda

Arguments for extending TJ beyond its traditional scope have proliferated over the past decade. Most commonly, these extensions involve accounting for socioeconomic limitations and how these limitations affect the adoption of TJ initiatives (^{Urueña & Prada, 2018}). For most of the research program's life, TJ inquiries have been almost exclusively informed by frameworks and theories based on legal and quasi-legal approaches, especially in human rights law. However, as TJ's contact with a number of social sciences (e.g., geography, anthropology, and sociology) increased, the result of their interaction has been the inevitable broadening of the research program's agenda beyond law, including a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary inquiry (^{Arthur, 2009}; ^{Bell 2009}). TJ and PP share this commitment to interdisciplinary exploration and cross-disciplinary sharing (^{Ralston, 2011a}). TJ scholars have also begun to consider developmental constraints, given that a country's scarce resources could limit its ability to implement TJ measures and institutionalize long-term solutions (^{Duthie, 2008}; ^{Urueña & Prada, 2018}).

The Institutional Moment

In what is now referred to as "fourth generation transitional justice," TJ scholars have taken a decidedly institutional turn (^{Sharp, 2013}). Even some critical theorists, who would normally limit themselves to criticizing the dominant research paradigm, have chosen to refocus their energies on projects to create TJ solutions and design new institutions (^{Birjandian 2019}). Several are based on "interrogating the peripheries" and correcting "some of the foundational blindspots and limitations of the field" (^{Sharp, 2019}). Other scholars and practitioners have sought institutional fixes and discourse alterations that appropriately negotiate conflicting accounts of past events (^{Bell, Campbell & Aolain, 2004}).

Instead of aiming for fundamental transformations of the social order (what is sometimes called "transformational justice"), these fourth generation TJ scholars adopt a more modest, incremental approach to institutional design in transitional societies, leading them to deploy mid-sized institutional fixes (^{McAuliffe, 2017b}, p. 175). For example, in some transitional societies, institutionalization involves the creation of TJ ministries, miniature bureaucracies for administering small-scale transitional solutions (e.g., the building of memorials), initiated by domestic entrepreneurs rather than international bodies (^{McAuliffe, 2017a}; ^{Lamont et. al., 2019}).

This institutional moment represents an opportunity for pragmatists to make their mark on the TJ research program. As I have discussed elsewhere, pragmatism, and especially Deweyan pragmatism, are entirely compatible with a focus on institutional design, in virtue of the twin emphases on methodological pluralism and the flexibility of inquiry, especially evident in Dewey's open-ended statements on what counts as suitably democratic political arrangements (^{Ralston, 2010}; 2019b). Unfortunately, such collaboration has been blocked because of an assortment of mistaken views TJ scholars hold about pragmatism, to which we turn.

II. TJ's MISTAKEN VIEW OF PRAGMATISM

Despite the virtually non-existent intersection between the TJ and PP literatures, TJ scholars do make infrequent references to pragmatism, though more often to vulgar or simplistic characterizations of the concept. Here, 'pragmatic' means expeditious, situationally responsive, forward looking, and effective. For example, Colleen ^{Murphy (2016)} characterizes Ruti Teitel's approach to TJ as pragmatic: "Transitional justice is . . . pragmatic in the sense that just responses to wrongdoing will offer a pragmatic resolution to the dilemmas inherent in transitional contexts" (p. 19). Pragmatic for Murphy means situationally responsive or adaptive. However, most TJ scholars are guilty of pedestrian mistakes in this area too, mischaracterizing either pragmatism or its relation to justice studies. Besides casual references to pragmatism as being exclusively forward-looking, the three most common and serious mistakes are as follows: (1) miscalculating pragmatism as simple expediency, (2) mistaking pragmatists for IR Realists and (3) understanding pragmatists as exclusively non-ideal theorists of justice.

Although it could be objected that TJ scholars' criticisms of pragmatism are aimed at a shallow or vulgar version of the concept exclusively, not the more philosophical version, the two are closely related. For instance, Murphy's usage (above) indicates how TJ mechanisms confront contradictions by flexibly responding to unique country contexts and adapting to transitional situations. Context sensitivity is not only a characteristic of vulgar pragmatism, but also of its sophisticated cousin, Philosophical Pragmatism (^{Johnson, 2009}, p. 45). As Michael ^{Eldridge (2009)} remarked, the adjectival and generic senses of pragmatism motivate the philosophically robust concept. Since these attacks aim at the weaker version, but pretend to undermine pragmatist accounts generally, these critiques of pragmatism resemble straw-person arguments.

Pragmatism is Simply Expediency by Another Name

TJ scholars often conflate pragmatism with expediency. For instance, Jack ^{Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri (2003)} see pragmatism as an expedient method of reaching compromise through bargaining: "When enforcement power is weak, pragmatic bargaining may be an indispensable tool in getting perpetrators to relinquish power and desist from their abuses" (p. 12). Colleen ^{Murphy (2016)}, likewise, argues that some advocates of TJ are too quick to embrace 'pragmatic considerations' -by which she means expedient- while neglecting moral concerns. When institutionalizing TJ through compromises (e.g. sacrificing fairness for post-conflict normalcy), pragmatists ignore morally complex claims by war crime victims about moral desert. In Murphy's words, "establishing a truth commission may be justified in a transitional context, but [not] summary executions [ . . . for] reducing or ending violence is not only of pragmatic interest for those potentially targeted, but reflects a moral concern with preventing unnecessary suffering" (p. 9). While the point is well taken (that is, choosing any efficient means is not morally defensible), a so-called 'pragmatic interest' encompasses further commitments to experimentalism, fallibilism, context-sensitivity, and moral progress, not just expediency. Nevertheless, Murphy is correct that pragmatism offers a more transparently instrumentalist way of construing justice: namely, as an effective means to achieve a collectively chosen end.

Pragmatists are Disguised IR Realists

Jack Snyder and Leslie Vinjamuri (2004) present three lenses of TJ: (i) legal, (ii) pragmatist, and (iii) emotional-psychological. Similar to IR Realism, pragmatism guides the choice of TJ mechanisms by asking which options will consolidate power and advance the self-interest of specific actors, especially nation-states (p. 350). Since the project of post-conflict reconciliation and peacebuilding has predominantly fallen within the purview of IR Liberals, the identification of pragmatism with IR Realism pits it against TJ's vision, mission, and goals. Pragmatists are thereby exiled to the camp of IR Realists and the history of Realpolitik.

The tendency of TJ scholars to equate Philosophical Pragmatists with IR Realists is likely due to a common error noted by Michael ^{Eldridge (2009)}, namely, conflating the adjectival sense of pragmatism (pragmatic understood as opportunistic) or common-sense pragmatism (pragmatism as flexibly adaptive to situations) with the sophisticated philosophical sense (Philosophical Pragmatism as a commitment to experimentalism, fallibilism, pluralism, meliorism etc.). Since Realism indicates that nation-states behave opportunistically and react flexibly to the international situation in order to advance their interests, it is unsurprising that the Pragmatists would be equated with Realists (^{Weber, 2013}). However, pragmatists such as Dewey expressly criticized the Realpolitik that characterized early versions of IR Realism. Dewey's approach to internationalism and endorsement of the Outlawry of War movement place him in the orbit of IR Liberals and Cosmopolitans, not IR Realists. He wished to fashion American foreign policy instruments to resolve global problems, not to simply weaponize it as a means to advance U.S. geopolitical interests (Ryder).

Pragmatists Theorize Justice Exclusively in Nonideal Terms

Rather than theorize justice under ideal or perfect conditions, Philosophical Pragmatists, according to the editors of the only collection on pragmatism and justice, show a unique concern for just arrangements, achieved under non-ideal circumstances: "Because pragmatists tend not to be involved in the search for 'perfect justice' -because justice is not, they think, the sort of thing one 'gets right' once and for all- they tend also not to be perturbed by the fact that judgments of justice and injustice suffer from a certain degree of vagueness and indeterminacy" (^{Dieleman, Rondel & Voparil, 2017}, p. 6). Given this self-characterization, TJ scholars have also begun to characterize Philosophical Pragmatism as endorsing a non-ideal theory of justice or as anti-ideal theory tout court.

Unfortunately, this characterization casts pragmatists in an excessively simplistic light. For instance, Elizabeth ^{Anderson (2010)} insists that PPs' "method is unorthodox" insofar as it begins "from diagnosis of injustices in the actual world" (3). In actuality, Pragmatists' empirical method starts with specifying the background conditions of a problematic situation, not with diagnosis. Given TJ's history of negotiating its own undertheorization problem, welcoming a group of scholars into the TJ fold who are, according to them, opposed to ideal theory would not appear wise. To the contrary, though, as ^{Festenstein (2017)} reminds us, Dewey conceived ideals and ideal theory as regulative of inquiry, motivating inquirers toward grander achievements, rather than permitting them to simply settle for second-best alternatives. Relative to what I have called the "three cornerstones of pragmatism" (hope, growth, and progress), ideals and ideal theory regulate personal growth, guide inquiry toward successful outcomes, and inspire something closer to perfection than would otherwise be possible (^{Ralston, 2017}, 2019b). Ideal theory is a recurrent feature of PP (^{Pappas, 2016}). So, casting pragmatists as exclusively nonideal theorists is counterproductive to any project of cooperation between contemporary pragmatists and TJ scholars.

III. DEWEY ON VIOLENCE, TRANSITIONS, AND JUSTICE

How can Philosophical Pragmatists and Philosophical Pragmatism, generally, assist the TJ research program in reconceptuali-zing violence, transitional, justice, and institution-building? John Dewey's writings on international relations, education, and politics offer new avenues towards understanding what events ought to trigger TJ measures, both domestically and internationally, and how intrusive or coercive these measures should ultimately be. Although Dewey and Deweyan Pragmatists cannot offer final solutions, they can suggest a bevy of situationally-flexible tools and novel pathways for tackling TJ issues. These include: (1) widening TJ's traditionally narrow justice horizon, or what are considered to be relevant harms or injustices that TJ mechanisms can address, (2) reconstructing the meaning of transitional in terms of the Deweyan notion of justiciability and (3) enlarging TJ to encompass a pluralist notion of justice in transition.

Violence and a Wider Justice Horizon

Traditionally, TJ studies conceive conflict as a narrowly defined range of harms associated with international human rights abuses and violations of humanitarian law. Genocides, civil wars, terrorism, and unjustified violence against civilian populations fall within this narrow band of harm-inducing injustices. The victims of violence in transitional societies suffer from ills outside of physical harm though, including loss of voice, decreased sense of political agency, social ostracism, and feelings of shame, especially once the events gain international attention (^{McEvoy & McConnachie, 2013}). Although TJ scholars and practitioners account for these non-physical harms resulting from conflict in transitional societies, the TJ research program has what critical theorists would call a "narrow justice horizon" (^{Sharp, 2019}). Excluded from that horizon are many other forms of equally unjustified violence, much of which originates with the state and little of which is proscribed by international law. This category includes gender-based violence, violence against journalists, cultural violence, structural violence, and economic violence (^{Gready & Robins, 2014}; Sharp 2018).

John Dewey's theory of value offers one avenue towards expanding TJ's narrow justice horizon. In "Some Questions about Value," Dewey articulated a theory of conflict in terms of value incommensurability. He notes that "at the present time serious differences in valuing are in fact treated as capable of settlement only by recourse to force and in so far the view in question has empirical support" (my emphasis). Force, by a state or nonstate actor, is only justified to settle conflicts that involve so-called "serious differences in valuing." He goes on: "This is the case in recourse to war, between nations, and in less obvious and complete ways in domestic disputes between groups and in conflicts between classes." (MW 35, p. 107). Wars between nation-states should always be a last resort, reflecting deep value incommensurability between opposing regimes, peoples, and their ways of life. Justifying force requires the exhaustion of alternative means, such as diplomacy, deliberation, and negotiation. In the case of civil wars and genocides, or "domestic disputes between groups," the state has a duty to intervene. The extreme "differences in valuing" (in Dewey's words), or value incommensurability (in my own), between conflicting non-state actors or groups (e.g. the Hutus and Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide) make intervention incumbent upon the state. In the language of IR Constructivists, these domestic conflicts should trigger a norm, the duty or "responsibility to protect (R2P)" innocent civilians, consistent with which the state must act (^{Ralph, 2018}). If the state fails to act to protect innocent civilians, or refuses to abide by the R2P norm, then it is complicit in the conflict. During the post-conflict period, evidence of human rights abuses should trigger appropriate TJ measures, whether lustrations to eliminate the responsible state officials, the building of memorials to commemorate the victims, or the holding of trials to ascertain the historical truth and how to achieve reconciliation within the affected communities.

Justiciability and the Transitional

Dewey's expanded definition of violence also suggests an alternative account of the transitional in TJ. After noting that value incommensurability precipitates justified conflict in "Some Questions about Value," Dewey (1996/1944) elaborates a crucial distinction: "In international relations short of war, the view is practically taken in acceptance of an ultimate difference between 'justiciable' and 'non-justiciable'disputes" (my emphasis) (MW 35, p. 108). A justiciable dispute is one that can be settled by the courts, judges, judicial panels, legal processes, etc. A non-justiciable dispute, cannot. Rather than focus on the dispute itself, in societies that are questionably transitional, we should instead survey the institutional background conditions and ask: Is there rule of law? Are there suitably impartial judges? Is there a non-politicized judicial system in place? Are there institutions of justice that can reliably deliver outcomes that are widely perceived as just, not simply the dictates of the ruling political party?

On this Dewey-inspired definition of 'transitional', TJ is unique insofar as it applies to societies with specific features that mark its institutions of justice as overwhelmingly defective or unstable because disagreements are no longer justiciable, such as (1) laws that are not widely enforced, (2) state actors who commit crimes with impunity, (3) government sanctioned violence against individuals or groups (e.g. dissidents and civil society activists), and (4) little trust that the government is a fair and impartial party with the legitimate power to create and enforce norms.

The terrain of transitional justice overlaps, to some degree, with ordinary justice insofar conflict associated with rule of law breakdown should trigger TJ processes. ^{Posner and Vermeule (2004)} insist that "[i]f transitional justice is continuous with ordinary justice, then there is no reason to treat transitional justice measures as presumptively suspect on either moral or institutional grounds, unless we are to treat the justice systems of consolidated liberal democracies as suspect as well" (p. 764). This position directly challenges Murphy's contention that TJ is distinctive insofar as it is discontinuous with ordinary justice. Recall that Murphy demands that there is a full breakdown of rule of law and judicial mechanisms in order to trigger TJ. However, Dewey's notion of justiciability bridges the gap between the two positions, offering a third way: namely, if in the wake of conflict and impunity for mass rape, murder and torture the situation cannot be resolved through judicial means (that is, they are injusticiable), then the implementation of smaller-scale TJ measures are prima facie warranted. Ordinary justice does not usually have contingency plans for its own breakdown (except perhaps the adoption of martial law) and TJ on Murphy's account does not allow for borderline cases, where there still exist vestiges of rule of law and democratic governance, but the institutions and practices are so defective that resolving the conflict at hand proves impossible. The Deweyan alternative -based on Dewey's distinction between justiciable and injusticiable disputes- offers a contingency plan when ordinary justice cannot deliver and traditional TJ cannot accommodate borderline cases.

Pluralist Justice in Transition

In John Dewey's lifetime, the notion of a global political order emerged as dominant theme in his writings, especially during the years immediately prior to the United States' entrance into WWI. The international order, he insisted, demands more than protocols, bilateral treaties and trade agreements. In a global environment of competing nation-states, international institutions are commonly designed to promote peace, but in fact they are incapable of it. At best, they can reconstruct societies torn asunder by the inevitable stream of wars, civil wars and regional conflicts. Though the emergence of the TJ paradigm was still many years off, Dewey anticipated it in his critique of peacekeeping.⁷

For Dewey, peacekeeping is a negative ideal insofar as it presumes that the conditions engendering conflict between nations are perpetually fixed. Disrupting peaceful relations is of course harmful, he writes in Democracy and Education, when it upends the "fruitful processes of cooperation" (MW, p. 203). Instead of preserving peace, though, nation-states should aim to realize a positive ideal in the world order, namely the "furtherance of the breadth and depth of human intercourse" irrespective of differences in class or race, geography, or national boundaries (MW 8, pp. 203 - 204). The realization of this pluralistic ideal of justice on a global scale thus requires international and domestic institutions to further human association as broad as humanity -a view that approximates what would nowadays be called Liberal Internationalism or Cosmopolitanism, not IR Realism.

On a more localized level, pluralist justice in transition means investing in institutions -schools, civic associations, sports clubs, deliberative assemblies, etc.-that bring people of different tribes, neighborhoods, races, ethnicities, and socio-economic classes together and into dialogue. In The Public and Its Problems,^{Dewey (1996}/1927) insisted that the formation of "common meanings" through communication contributes to the creation of a "community of interest and endeavor" (LW 2, p. 124). Likewise, in Democracy and Education, he describes how the school becomes a community for the "intermingling of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs," and thus constitutes a "broader environment" of discourse and tolerance (MW 9, pp. 25-26). Through dialogue comes understanding and the appreciation of differences. Through understanding and the appreciation of differences come shared values (or value commensurability). And through shared values, the conditions to avoid balkanization, conflict, and genocidal violence are instituted.

A Pragmatist Account of Institutions

For Dewey, institutions consist of funded beliefs and habits - what organizational theorists call 'organizational culture'- the accretion of which have created objective organizations and agencies that persist in space and time.⁸ According to Dewey, "[t] o say . . . [something] is institutionalized is to say that it involves a tough body of customs, ingrained habits of actions, organized and authorized standards and methods of procedure" (LW 3, p. 153). So, ideas and ideals do not exhaust political experience; for their meaning to be suitably enriched, they should also manifest in stable political forms. However, ideals qualify the stability of institutional forms, permitting them to organically develop through critical scrutiny and reform.⁹ While Dewey acknowledges that successful "institutions . . . are stable and enduring," their stability is "only relatively fixed" because "they constitute the structure of the processes that go on . . . and are not forced upon processes from without" (LW 14, p. 119). In ^{Hegel's (2018}/1807) philosophy of right, the dialectical opposition between intellect and sense gradually transforms into self-consciousness and social institutions from a raw physical world; ultimately, they are reconciled in the Absolute, where "the real is rational, and the rational is real." Although Dewey's Hegel-influenced pragmatism dispenses with the Absolute, it retains a concern for how ideas and ideals directly influence the growth of those habit-funded processes called institutions.¹⁰

Emphasizing institutions does not preclude concern for individuals, though. Indeed, personal growth is, for Dewey, a precondition for institutional development, for "individuals who are democratic in thought and action are the sole final warrant for the existence and endurance of democratic institutions" (LW 14, p. 92). So, as not to pre-emptively foreclose the many possible avenues before us, Dewey purposely avoided recommending a set of institutional arrangements or a final destination in the quest to realize a better form of democracy. In stark contrast, Francis ^{Fukuyama (1989)} declares that by the latter half of the twentieth-century "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government" had been reached (p. 210). Rather than advocate for "political democracy" or a discrete set of political institutions (in Fukuyama's case, liberal democratic ones), Dewey proposed a set of leading principles or postulations that together are termed the "social idea" of democracy (LW 2, p. 325).¹¹ As postulations, these ideas are intended to direct subsequent investigations into the design of a stable and viable governing apparatus; however, taken alone, they have no direct correspondence with any particular set of institutions.¹²

Dewey understands democracy as an open-ended struggle to achieve an emancipatory ideal which enriches individual and communal experiences. Although "the measure of the worth of any social institution" is usually its "limited and more immediately practical" consequences, what the measure should be, Dewey insists, is "its effect in enlarging and improving experience."¹³ Realizing the ideal (i.e., the social idea of democracy) usually requires institutional change. In Dewey's words, "institutions exist for people, not the other way around. Institutions are means and agencies of human welfare and progress and should be judged by how well they serve those ends" (LW 14, p. 93). However, Dewey does not presume to know -let alone recommend- the exact character or even the general direction of that institutional change in advance of its determination by the people and institutions of actual political democracies (e.g., elections, commissions of inquiry, judicial decisions, and regulatory agency rulings). Generating social and political reforms demands institutional transformation. However, the instrumentalities of change should not be preordained by a philosopher. According to David ^{Waddington (2008)}, Dewey "refuse[d] to specify the shape of social change in advance. If social change is to be truly democratic, it needs to be placed in the hands of the demos, in the hands of the workers and citizens who will actually make the change" (p. 62). Specifying the right political-institutional technology to obtain social change would block opportunities for citizens to develop competencies through their own participation in the process.

In this way, Dewey was a more complicated political theorist than most commentators (e.g., ^{Anderson, 2010}, p. 3) give him credit. The orientation of his political theorizing is neither thoroughly ideal, nor entirely non-ideal (^{Ralston, 2010}). He communicates the aspirational dimension of democratic transformation without stipulating the exact mechanisms or outcomes of institutional change. Unlike ^{Rawls (1971)}, he does not specify two principles ofjustice or anticipate the outcome of an idealized choice situation (i.e., deliberations in the Original Position). Unlike ^{Nozick (1974)}, he does not specify the scope of authority that should be legitimately wielded by a government (i.e., a minimalist state). The reason for his intentional vagueness on these points is the avoidance of foreclosing future possibilities for development by institutional designers. Thus, for Dewey's heirs, it is left to contemplate particular tactics, strategies, and fixes when actual cases of institutional breakdown and transition occur-to which we now turn.

A Maltese Case Study

No inquiry into the question of how to institutionalize TJ in transitional societies would be complete without at least one case study.

Much of the extant literature addresses TJ cases outside Europe- for instance, in post-Apartheid South Africa (^{Allais, 2012}, and ^{van Zyl, 1999}), Ethiopia (^{Denbel, 2013}, and ^{Sarkin, 1999}), and Chile (^{Borzutsky, 2017}, and ^{Collins, 2010}). Instead, the present inquiry examines a transitional society in North Africa/Europe, a dysfunctional democracy and former British colony plagued by official corruption, state-sanctioned violence, abuse of executive power, rule of law breakdown, and civil society suppression: the Mediterranean island-nation of Malta.

Transitional societies commonly feature more salient and exaggerated institutional characteristics than are typical in normal, stable, or non-transitional democratic societies (^{Posner & Vermeule, 2004}). Malta clearly belongs to the category of 'transitional societies' in the enlarged pragmatist sense-that is, a transforming society. It displays evidence of institutional dysfunction but glimmers of hope for repair: 1) political capture of state regulatory bodies, 2) bribery and kickbacks to corrupt state actors, 3) rule of law breakdown, 4) abuse of executive power, 5) suppression of free speech, 6) civil society repression, 7) state-sanctioned violence against private citizens, especially journalists, and 8) refusals by corrupt state actors to resign. However, unlike most traditional transitional societies, it has not suffered war or genocide since colonization.

Arguably, Malta has been in a period of transition ever since either its independence (1964) or its transformation into a republic (1974). The worst state violence occurred in the late 1980s, when the country was on the verge of civil war, a period often referred to as the "Mintoff years" (after Dom Mintoff, the Prime Minister and Labour Party Leader). As Thomas ^{Carothers (2002)} observes, most postcolonial, developing nations whose political systems are plagued by corruption, abuse of power, state violence, and civil society repression stay in transitional purgatory, a "precarious middle ground between full-fledged democracy and outright dictatorship," and this becomes their perpetual "state of normality" (pp. 17-18). The return of the Maltese Labour Party to power in 2013 brought with it a new wave of corruption, and, by 2017, one of the most extreme acts of violence against a Maltese citizen: the assassination of Labour Party critic and investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. With the rule of law breakdown, an inquiry into the murder has been long delayed. Since justice delayed is justice denied, regime critics and investigative journalists fear that any attempt to prod the corrupt leadership to undertake the inquiry will only lead to retaliation, thus undermining a process of healing and reconciliation.

It might be objected that any project to foster transitional justice in Malta would require institutional overhaul on the scale of demolition and rebuilding. Public corruption is rampant. Practically all political institutions are compromised. Political assassination and tribal cronyism have become normalized. Instead, on Deweyan model, TJ would involve the deployment of small interventions that undercut the status quo, end the ómerta among political elites, and empower civil society and supporters of an inquiry into journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination. A spirit of experimentation would have to pervade any Deweyan project to engender a healthy transition for Malta to a more just society, through peace and reconciliation, not force and violence.