Cyanne Loyle’s Escaping Justice offers a compelling explanation for why post-conflict governments with blood on their hands have increasingly escaped justice despite growing global calls for accountability. Loyle argues that culpable governments strategically adapt to the global norm of accountability in ways that minimize threats to their legitimacy and political survival. Culpable governments’ adaptation strategies depend on their capacity to control accountability processes. High capacity governments are likely to employ coercion, using repression to monitor and regulate a transitional justice process,. Governments with moderate capacity are likely to pursue containment, embedding a government’s chosen response within existing state institutions or policies that enable it to effectively slow walk or undermine accountability efforts. And governments with limited capacity make concessions or provide limited accountability for wrongdoings. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research in Rwanda, Uganda, and Northern Ireland, Loyle convincingly demonstrates how these strategies enable governments to limit accountability and exposes how accountability pressures can backfire, potentially strengthening governments responsible for atrocities.These strategies are not unique to the contemporary age. Loyle raises the question of what happens if the global accountability norm continues to weaken. Governments might return to amnesties and reject transitional justice outright. Escaping Justice makes an original and compelling intervention in the study of international norms and transitional justice. It exposes how accountability pressures can backfire and undermine transitional justice efforts. Ultimately, understanding who is held accountable for egregious human rights violations, and why, is essential if transitional justice is to succeed. This book provides an invaluable road map for those working to ensure that it does.

A full version of this review appears in Roundtable 18-4 for the Jervis Forum, available here.