Giustizia di transizione: modelli, potenzialità, limiti: casi concreti e un focus sulla Tunisia contemporanea

This paper examines the potential and the limits of transitional justice, ana lysing its main models and defining three sets of reasons – strategic, legal and substantive – for which criminal law alone proves insufficient in the contexts in which this type of justice is applied. The description of the substantive reasons therefore leads to an analysis of the similarities and differences be tween transitional justice and restorative justice, focusing on the notions of “truth”, “memory” and “forgiveness”, and using the exemplary case of post-apartheid South Africa. It then addresses the role of the colonial legacy in the countries of the South of the world, which have been the privileged scenarios of transitional justice since the 1980s, as an unavoidable element in the objective of restoring a complete and truly shared memory. Finally, these reflections will be put to the test by comparing them with the concrete case of Tunisia after the so-called Spring of 2011, on the basis of a field research carried-out between the autumn of 2021 and the spring of 2022