Over time, political and social theorists have struggled to understand the constructive pathways of preventing, mediating, and transitioning societies away from conflict toward sustainable peace. The thread linking leadership with transitional justice instruments is the ontological and epistemological understanding of how to direct judicial strategies toward deterring interstate and intrastate violent activities. In today's environment, the emerging study of transitional justice is recognized as a staple for nation-building, democratic reform, and peacebuilding. This chapter addresses leadership and its role in the transitional justice system. Moreover, this presentation provides a leadership model for transitional justice practitioners as a means to influence deterrence measures and as a potential resolution of today's global judicial challenges with long-term international security implications.
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In the 21st century, researchers believe that the global environment is characterized by political and economic instability, global terrorism, and proliferation of interstate and intrastate conflict, all of which require greater interdisciplinary understanding of what is needed to lead in an international environment (Kaufman et al., 2004; Spero & Hart, 2003). To inform this study, an examination of leader characteristics and traits reflects the significance and complexity that judicial actors encounter in executing transitional justice instruments (Bass & Bass, 2008; Judge, Piccolo, & Kosalka, 2009; Zaccaro, 2007). The significance of understanding the leadership traits of actors needed within the international criminal court (ICC) not fills a literature gap both within the leadership and transitional justice discipline.
The academic literature points out that as trials and truth and reconciliation commissions have received much of the debate, scholars view the significance of other transitional instruments, such as deterrence, lustration, amnesty, reparations, memory, and victim assistance programs, as playing a critical role in laying the foundation toward the cessation of state discourse and the promotion of national healing (Dancy, 2010; Thoms, Ron, & Paris, 2008). Studies by Judge et al. (2009) and Zaccaro (2007), in which statistical models were used to determine individual traits, present evidence showing that leadership traits and attributes differ along contextual lines of operation and approaches. Leadership traits here mean personal characteristics or behavioral attributes that foster leadership effectiveness by resolving problems across the full spectrum of team and organizational situations (Bass & Bass, 2008; Zaccaro, 2007). Leadership effectiveness, however, is defined as influencing others to resolve conflicting organizational demands by managing, shaping, and developing collective activities into a workable plan toward organizational goals and objectives (Bass & Bass, 2008; Zaccaro, 2007). Across several decades, however, studies that link personality traits to universal leadership traits are inconclusive. In the domain of transitional justice, for example, scholars argue that rogue leaders initiate hard power to commence conflict based on national interest, along with socio-ethnic and religious ideology as a means of altering political governance structures (Crocker et al., 2008; Nye, 2010; Van Dijk, 2000). On the other hand, scholars view that transitional state leaders must use not only use hard power but also soft power as a means to recognize intervention points and lead the sequence of events in the cessation of conflict. This understanding is particularly significant as leaders within the international courts navigate through the myriad of conflicting political interests, constrained economic resources, fragmented security capabilities, and weak legal institutions. (Brinkerhoff, 2011; Carothers & DeGramont, 2011; Fukuyama, 2004; Olsen, Payne, & Reiter, 2010; Quinn, 2009; Thoms et al, 2010).