Transitional justice (TJ) is undergoing a legitimacy crisis. While recent critical TJ scholarship has touted the transformative potential of locally rooted mechanisms as a possible means to emancipate TJ, this burgeoning literature rests on shaky assumptions about the purported benefits of local TJ and provides inadequate attention to local-national power dynamics. By taking these factors into consideration, this article contends that local TJ efforts can be used to deflect justice in manners that paradoxically allow ruling parties to avoid human rights accountability and to conceal the truth about wartime violations. It further argues that the principal method by which justice is subverted is not through overt manipulation by abusive governments, but rather, through subtle and indirect ‘distortional framing’ practices, which ruling parties use to set discursive limits around discussions of conflict-related events and to obfuscate their own serious crimes. After developing this argument theoretically, the case study of Cambodia is considered in detail to reveal and to trace the processes by which distortional framing has been used as a technique to deflect justice.

中文翻译：

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框架、讲真话和地方过渡司法的局限性

过渡时期司法（TJ）正在经历合法性危机。虽然最近的批判性 TJ 学术已经吹捧当地植根机制的变革潜力作为解放 TJ 的一种可能手段，但这种新兴的文献建立在对地方 TJ 的所谓好处的摇摇欲坠的假设上，并且对地方-国家权力动态的关注不足。考虑到这些因素，本文认为当地的 TJ 努力可用于偏转以自相矛盾的方式伸张正义，使执政党逃避人权责任，隐瞒战时侵权行为的真相。它进一步认为，破坏正义的主要方法不是通过滥用政府的公开操纵，而是通过微妙和间接的“扭曲框架”实践，执政党使用这些实践来围绕与冲突相关事件的讨论设置话语限制，以及掩盖自己的严重罪行。在理论上发展了这一论点之后，对柬埔寨的案例研究进行了详细考虑，以揭示和追踪扭曲框架被用作扭曲正义的技术的过程。