Between Peace and Punishment: Fostering Legitimacy of Atrocity Accountability After War in Colombia

Prior scholarship shows that, in the aftermath of war, citizens tend to favor retributive over restorative forms of justice, which can undermine peace implementation. In this project, we examine whether citizens’ preferences for justice mechanisms depend on the information they have about the objectives underlying such restorative measures. We argue that highlighting the benefits of restorative justice—specifically, its role in enabling combatant demobilization and addressing victims’ grievances— can increase citizen support for non-retributive accountability, enhance the perceived legitimacy of human rights courts, and bolster support for peace implementation. Focusing on Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP, in Spanish), established under the 2016 peace accord to prosecute war atrocities, we will conduct a two-wave panel survey to measure pre- treatment attitudes and to experimentally assess the impact of information treatments. Our findings will provide systematic evidence on citizen preferences for retributive and restorative justice in violent democracies where trust in judicial institutions is low, while also identifying communication strategies that can strengthen institutional legitimacy and citizen support for peace implementation.