on human rights promotion. This led to a worldwide focus and progressive rise of human rights regime culminating in the establishments of international human rights laws and conventions. The emphasis of transitional justice was on how abuses of human rights get treated during political transition: legal and criminal prosecution. As noted earlier, the universal conceptions of "justice" became the platform on which transitional justice was premised. The field in its early epistemology, thus, assumed jurisprudence of human rights. As a result, the initial literature on transitional justice was dominated by lawyers, law, and legal rights: defining laws, and processes on how to deal with human rights abuse and holding people accountable. Thus, transitional justice has its roots in both the human rights movement and in international human rights and humanitarian law. These origins in the human rights movement have rendered transitional justice "self-consciously victim-centric". The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a shift in the focus of transitional justice. Informed by the worldwide wave of democratization, particularly the third wave, transitional justice reemerged as a new field of study in democratization. Transitional justice broadened its scope from more narrow questions of jurisprudence to political considerations of developing stable democratic institutions and renewing civil society. Studies by scholars on the transition from autocratic regimes to democratic ones have integrated the transitional justice framework into an examination of the political processes inherent to democratic change. The challenges of democratization in transitional periods are many: settling past accounts without derailing democratic progress, developing judicial or third-party fora capable of resolving conflicts, reparations, and creating memorials and developing educational curricula that redress cultural lacunae and unhealed trauma. It is clear that elements of transitional justice have broken the initial mold of post-war jurisprudence. The transitional justice framework has benefited from democratic activists who sought to bolster fledgling democracies and bring them into line with the moral and legal obligations articulated in the international human rights consensus. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have used transitional justice approaches to address Indigenous oppression. Racial justice issues in the United States have been discussed using transitional justice language. One particular innovation is the appearance of truth commissions. Beginning with Argentina in 1983, Chile in 1990, and South Africa in 1995, truth commissions have become a symbol of transitional justice, appearing in transitional societies in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. However, several attempts to create a regional