rT ansitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation in post-communist aE stern uE rope: Romania and Albania. past. Without a transition cycle that includes the need to address injustice, most scholars in the field (i.e. Arnould & Sriram 2014, Magara 2016) rightly believe that we cannot safely assume to have reached the stage of a consolidated democracy. Afterall, requiring transitional justice is a much higher bar than the two-turnover tests, for example. State leaders are often held accountable through retributive mechanisms like criminal prosecutions and to a lesser extent and indirectly through restorative mechanisms like truth commissions. The definition of transitional justice remains contested, but, in general, it refers to the legal and non-legal mechanisms that states undertake after gross violations of individual and collective rights from the previous regime. These mechanisms include but are not limited inter alia criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations, lustration, apologies, memorials, institutional reform etc. Initially dominated by legal scholars, the early focus of the field was on questions of leadership and mass accountability in democratic transition. According to Ní Aoláin and Campbell (2005), this made possible the framing of transitional justice as a coherent set of narratives and discourse, which provided the framework for the field in the future. Later on, the focus expanded and included also other aspects such as reparations and truth telling, reconciliation, forgiveness, healing etc. (de Brito 2001, Borer 2006, Stover & Weinstein 2004). The debate between the need for trials as the primary weapon of dealing with the past versus truth commissions, was one of the yet unsolved dilemmas of scholars engaging early on with transitional justice in democratizing societies (Hayner 2002; Aukerman 2002). This constituted essentially the core debate between retributive justice and restorative justice. Reflecting a somewhat more philosophical tone, this debate centered on the “underlying philosophy of justice that should inform accountability for past violence” (Aiken 2013). On the other hand, from an empirical perspective, some authors have convincingly demonstrated that truth commissions have little impact on democracy (Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2010). This is puzzling and opens up new avenues of research because it contradicts some of the intuitive thinking and seems to discard the link between some measures of transitional justice, such as truth commissions, as having much impact on democratic consolidation. Therefore, we might assume that early and successful implementation of transitional justice measures do not necessarily impact a rapid democratization, which is counter-intuitive on first glance. Retributivists see justice in the form of some legal “revenge” against those found guilty (Hampton 1988, Roche 2007). This type of punishment would prevent acts of vengeance in the future, “thus breaking the cycle of violence” (Blewit 2008, 39) and potentially serve as the basis for a solid rule of law in the transformation stage. Without such catharsis, its advocates argue that is almost impossible to overcome the plagues of the past and to metamorphose toward a consolidated society based on concepts of justice and the rule of law. Quite opposite, restorative justice wants to make up and close the wounds of the past by restoring community ties and building a future based on a sense of commonness (Zehr 2002). Thus, restorative justice, as one author puts it, seeks the “transformation of subjective factors that impair community, such as anger, resentment, and desire for vengeance.” (Amstutz 2006: 166167). Any response to such collective brokenness must seek to restore the basic fabric of society by including the victim and the offender, as well as other community members. Restorative justice principles in general have become the guiding moral force behind the development of truth commissions following mass murders, war crimes, genocide and other gross violations of human rights. Among some of the benefits of truth commissions are the elimination of a regime’s ability to deny truth (Hayner 2011, 22), thus giving justice to the victims and making it easier to forgive or move forward toward possible reconciliation. 59