In Southeast Asia, transitional justice has a very mixed record. In Indonesia, impunity reigns over the 1965-66 massacres. In the Philippines, the Ferdinand Marcos regime has never been held accountable for its human rights violations. Yet even when transitional justice has appeared to make progress, its outcome has been conflicted. Cambodia’s hybrid trial of the Khmer Rouge period, although of great importance, has been shaped by a liberal teleological narrative that may not adequately address the depths of the country’s tragedy. And the International Criminal Court’s most recent stunning arrest of Rodrigo Duterte may bring justice to many victims’ families of the brutal drug war, but this justice is also cloaked in political self-interest. Limited progress and conflicted outcomes thus appear to characterize the face of transitional justice in the region. The meaning of transitional justice in Southeast Asia is therefore shrouded in deep ambivalence with significant consequences for the region’s political development.

Erik Martinez Kuhonta is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University. In 2024-25, he is the John H. McArthur Research Fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. He is author of The Institutional Imperative: The Politics of Equitable Development in Southeast Asia (Stanford Press, 2011)​, which was short-listed for the Canadian Political Science Association Prize in Comparative Politics. He is co-editor of Party System Institutionalization in Asia: Democracies, Autocracies, and the Shadow of the Past (Cambridge Press, 2015) and Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford Press, 2008). Kuhonta has held visiting fellowships at Stanford University, the National University of Singapore, the East-West Center (Honolulu), and Kyoto University. He is former president of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies.