Americanizing Accountability: The Effects of US Interventions on Domestic Transitional Justice

How does the TJ agenda of post-transition societies change when foreign actors are involved? Focusing on the US as a foreign actor, I argue that US involvement in foreign TJ resulted in a more retributive TJ agenda, which emphasized criminal prosecutions of former perpetrators, rather than a reconciliatory framework, i.e. truth-revealing and reconciliatory mechanisms. The US did so by applying (1) economic coercion in the form of threats and/or actual sanctions and (2) creating increased financial and technical opportunities for the creation and implementation of TJ mechanisms. I use the Global Transitional Justice Dataset (GTJD) to test my hypotheses and conduct a case study in Liberia to analyze the underlying mechanism behind the observed relationships.