Denisa Kostovicova (LSE)

Great strides have been made in recent years to produce evidence-based claims about the effects of transitional justice on various aspects of peace-building, ranging from healing and restoring of war-torn relations to democratisation and rule-of-law in the aftermath of large scale human rights violations in post-conflict and post-authoritarian states. This development is a response to the oft-repeated criticism by scholars and practitioners that normative aims of transitional justice have lacked empirical grounding. Consequently, new evidence informing theory development in transitional justice has been spearheaded by applying quantitative social science methods, such as surveys, and survey and lab-in-the field experiments, while also aided by the creation of new datasets. However, there is a conspicuous lack of the quantitative study of discourse in this growing body of scholarship. This paper demonstrates how quantitative analysis of discourse can advance theory building in transitional justice. The argument is illustrated by measuring transitional justice effects with the application of two methods of quantitative analysis of discourse and their theoretical contributions: one derived by computer-assisted quantitative text analysis of debates about transitional justice and the other by statistical analysis of textual data derived by manual interpretative coding of a large corpus of discourse. Both examples are derived from addressing puzzles in transitional justice in the aftermath of the conflicts in the Balkans after the end of the Cold War. The paper concludes by reflecting on the text as data in the study of transitional justice, and the limits of qualitative study of discourse.