Seeing 22 July through transitional justice: what have we learned?

Introduction

22 July 2011, a terrorist bombed the Norwegian government district and carried out a mass shooting at the AUF youth camp at Utøya island. 77 people lost their lives. The lives of thousands of others changed abruptly and forever. 15 years have now passed.

Between 2020-2026, PRIO was part of LAW22JULY: RIPPLES – Ripple Effects, Rule of Law Values, and Learning, a project funded by the Research Council of Norway. The project examined the role of law in restoring and strengthening societal resilience and security in the aftermath of violent extremism. As part of this work, in a three-part book series in Norwegian called ‘Ringvirkninger’ (Ripples), we bring together a large number of researchers working on 22 July to reflect on this issue. The series is published by Cappelen Damm.

The second book in the series, After 22 July: Transitional Justice and Terror focuses on the various forms of accountability, reconciliation, and remembrance that have emerged in the years since the attacks. Bringing together perspectives from law, criminology, socio-legal studies, sociology, political science and philosophy, the volume examines criminal trials, inquiry commissions, policing reforms, victim recognition, and memorialization after 22 July as interconnected processes of transitional justice. The chapters explore how the pursuit of justice extends beyond formal legal procedures and criminal law, to encompass ongoing and contested practices involving state institutions, civil society, and affected communities. They address competing narratives, commemorative practices, and grassroots “micro-memories” as central to recognition and reconciliation. The chapters also examine tensions between security, rights, and state responsibility, while also reflecting on how understandings and expectations of justice are shaped by the passage of time.

Studies of post-conflict societies and large-scale terror attacks show that both the violence and society’s response reverberate for decades, possibly across generations. Fifteen years have now passed since the attacks. Yet, it is difficult to answer what justice after terror looks like. The focus of this book is how Norway as a democratic welfare state has navigated the aftermath of terror. While the first book in the Ripples series focuses on the relationship between victims, survivors and welfare state, the focus of the book is on the collective processes through which citizens, local communities, civil society and the state have tried to process and build justice after 22 July.

Bringing transitional justice home

Norwegian authorities have not explicitly framed their response to 22 July in terms of transitional justice. Nevertheless, by seeing different measures and responses as part of such a framework (also Sandvik 2023, Sandvik 2024), the volume seeks to broaden the concept of justice in the Norwegian context, where justice is easily equated with the legal system in general and criminal law in particular.

Much of the transitional justice scholarship revolves around a common set of questions: What does transitional justice actually entail? What, precisely, is to be regretted, forgiven, or reconciled – between which parties and how? What does it mean to recognize someone as a party to a transitional justice process, and what does it mean to be recognized as a victim? At its core, transitional justice is concerned with the role of the state. Typically, the state itself has exercised active and systematic violence against citizens and others, or it has been unwilling or unable to protect civilians. The state may thus become both a culpable and responsible actor in the processes of healing and reconciliation that transitional justice is meant to support, while also bearing responsibility for ensuring that such work takes place and that the needs of different groups are safeguarded.

The role and place of the state looks somewhat different in the emerging literature examining transitional justice after terrorism. This scholarship predominantly deals with Islamist terror attacks, security dilemmas and victim-categorization in Western democracies. At the same time, Norwegian scholarship has often focused on truth and reconciliation processes in relation to the indigenous Sámi or national minorities, or contexts in the Global South or Eastern Europe. With this anthology, and more specifically with the introductory chapter, we aim to bring transitional justice “home”. In doing so, we investigate how a state under the condition of rule of law and a welfare system responded to an extraordinary event like 22 July.

Our point of departure are the traditional building blocks of transitional justice: retribution and accountability, truth, reparation, remembrance, and guarantees of non-repetition. We examine how – and through which political, legal, and cultural mechanisms – the story of 22 July unfolds in society. This includes reflecting on how ideas of justice for victims and survivors, and for Norwegian society more broadly, have emerged and changed over time.

Beyond the criminal trial: law as a starting point, not an end point

In the second chapter, Kristin B. Sandvik and Hanna B. Haddeland challenge the notion that the criminal trial against Anders Behring Breivik – the perpetrator convicted for the 22 July attacks – constituted the end point of the legal reckoning after the terror. In the chapter, they position the trial as the starting point for a broader legal response which, alongside criminal proceedings, has dealt with reconstruction, memorialization, and welfare. Building on legal mobilization theory, they discuss legal disputes involving the government quarter, memorial sites, and the right to compensation and counsel for the injured and bereaved. In doing so, they reveal the diversity of motives and strategies among different actors in their mobilization of law. As much as Breivik’s trial remains the most visible form of transitional justice after 22 July, the authors show how legal accountability, trials and proceedings after the 22. July attacks remain unfinished and continually evolves.

Truth commissions, normality, and postponed debates

In the third chapter, Cathrine Holst asks whether Norway needed a truth commission after 22 July, and to what extent the 22 July Commission – the public inquiry appointed by the Government less than a month after the attacks – fulfilled such a mandate.

Through an analysis of the Commission’s composition, expertise, interpretation, and its critique and independence, Holst argues that what was most unusual about the 22 July Commission was the event that prompted it. As a Norwegian public inquiry, it was relatively “normal”. She reads this “normality” into Norwegian society’s longing for a return to the normal after such a trauma and suggests that the Commission contributed to consolidate our political community, constitutional order, and system of governance.

However, although the Commission had reconciling social functions, Holst points to that it simultaneously avoided some of the most difficult questions raised by the 22 July attacks, particularly those concerning the relationship between societal security and democracy (see chapter seven). In this way, a more comprehensive reckoning with the attacks were postponed, and important principled and public debates remained undebated.

Police, criticism, and renegotiated trust

Chapter four, by Helge Renå, examines how the police managed the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Renå describes how the police were subjected to sharp criticism, notably by the 22 July Commission, for their response – especially at Utøya – and how the police, as a public agency and employer, had to navigate this public critique.

His contribution shows how the police constantly negotiated their position in relation to multiple actors and audiences: the central directorate and political leadership, the public, relatives of victims, and their own organization. Negotiation, recognition, and accountability are integral to the relationship between police and society. Extraordinary events like 22 July test the trust that underpins this relationship. In the aftermath, trust must be renegotiated – perhaps precisely by acknowledging and “taking responsibility”.

Competing narratives and the ten-year commemoration as turning point

In chapter five, Anders Ravik Jupskås focuses on the ten-year commemoration of 22 July, and analyses public opinion surveys conducted before and after the anniversary. As such, the chapter reveals competing narratives about the attacks: what “really” happened, who and what were attacked, and what the consequences were, and how the ten-year commemoration enabled a reinterpretation of the dominant societal narrative.

Jupskås moreover underscores the importance of recognizing victims and their stories, and shows how victims’ perspectives were largely overlooked, and at times suppressed, in the immediate aftermath – something the ten-year commemoration helped to amend. In his analysis, he identifies three competing narratives in the aftermath of the 22 July attacks: the “democracy narrative” – which framed the attacks as directed against democracy as a whole, and focused on strengthening democratic values as the primary “response”; the “diversity narrative” – which saw the perpetrator as part of a growing anti-Muslim movement with links to right-wing populist parties such as the Progress Party; and the “far-right narrative” – which interpreted the attacks as caused by Norwegian immigration policy and denied their political targeting of the Labour Party and its youth wing (AUF).

The survey analysis shows that the ten-year commemoration marked a turning point, where the diversity narrative overtook the democracy narrative as the dominant interpretation of the attacks. According to Jupskås, however, the most dramatic change is the clear increase in the far-right narrative, after 2021, implying that the Labour Party has exploited 22 July. This suggests deepening polarization.

Micro-memories and the limits of state-led remembrance

Justice after terror is not only enacted in courts, commissions, and official speeches, but also in everyday acts of remembrance. In chapter six – and rather than focusing on official, state-initiated memorialization – Kristin B. Sandvik and Maja Vestad explore a parallel “landscape” of what they call “micro-memories”: ways in which victims of 22 July are remembered by family, friends, and local communities through diverse commemorative practices, memorials, and sites. Through the conceptualization and analysis of micro-memories, the authors cast a critical eye on transitional justice understood primarily as state-driven and show how micro-memories shift perspectives on how victims are remembered and how the consequences of the attacks are understood, both individually and collectively. They demonstrate that the transitional justice “toolbox” also contains relational and personal components that are more loosely connected to institutional responses.

Guarantees of non-repetition: human rights and security

Chapter seven, by Henrik Syse and Kristoffer Lidén, tackles one of the most difficult questions that arises after a terror attack like 22 July – and in efforts to prevent similar events from happening again. In the language of transitional justice, this concerns guarantees of non-repetition.

The authors note how human rights are often set up in opposition to national security in the name of counterterrorism, with rights framed as constraints on state control over the population. Through a philosophical discussion of human rights, they instead propose a more nuanced understanding of security as a human right, entailing that human rights considerations ought to be weighed in a democratic state’s demanding balancing act of securing safety, freedom, and rights for all.

In this perspective, guarantees of non-repetition cannot be reduced to more surveillance or tougher laws. They involve institutional, legal, and cultural commitments to uphold both security and justice at the same time.

Time, terror, and the expectations of reconciliation

In the closing chapter, Kjersti Lohne and Anette Bringedal Houge explore the relationship between terror, time, and justice. They discuss how the increasing temporal distance from the 22 July attacks shape and constrains society’s responses. Drawing on sociology of time and transitional justice literature, they reflect on how time—despite its passing in linear form—can be cyclical and merciless for those who feel that it stopped at that time when people they loved were taken from them.

At the heart of transitional justice lies a strong expectation of reconciliation, imagined along that same linear trajectory. Most definitions of transitional justice explicitly state that measures under its umbrella are meant to help people “put things behind them” and “move forward” – to reconcile themselves with what has happened and live on. This expectation raises difficult questions: For whom is justice really intended, if it is not attuned to survivors’ experience of time?

Lohne and Houge thus remind us that healing and reconciliation are neither simple, nor uniform or linear. Justice, in this framing, refers to different processes that individually and collectively aim to make it possible to live with, and live on after, mass violence.

Conclusion: Justice as ongoing work

Fifteen years after the attacks and seen through the lens of transitional justice, the Norwegian response to 22 July emerges as a complex and ongoing project. As researchers, we are part of these continuing efforts. Our job is to document how the meaning and narrative of 22 July is reinterpreted and reimagined over time and to interrogate what this means for accountability, victim rights, non-repetition and truth-telling. Across multiple disciplines, numerous research projects have contributed to the analysis and understanding of the attack in the years since 2011. Yet, the future of knowledge production about the ramifications of 22 July remains uncertain. Times have changed. Rearmament and preparedness for war, rather than counterterrorism, now dominate public debate and government agendas, including research funding priorities. As researchers, we must strive to carry the lessons of 22 July into our teaching, our supervision of future scholars, and into Norway’s future more broadly. By opening new directions for research and complementing prevalent framings of justice after terror, we hope that our book will inspire future research into the ripple effects of terror.