A/HRC/30/42 direct or indirect victims. 14 Given the Special Rapporteur’s interest in exploring the development of preventive policies, State institutions will be the main “duty bearers”. Nonetheless, considering the diversity of the potential elements of a comprehensive policy, those bearers are ultimately manifold. 27. Guarantees of non-recurrence are a function that can be satisfied by diverse measures. Thus, there is no such thing as a general non-recurrence policy. An effective policy designed to prevent systemic violations will need to adjust form to function and choose the proper instruments. C. Framing considerations 28. Three general considerations are relevant. First, transitional justice programmes have not taken into account sufficiently the significant differences between the post-authoritarian contexts, where the model of transitional justice originally took shape, and the situations of (post-)conflict and fragility in which it is now predominantly implemented. Two important differences relate to degrees of (State) institutionalization and the types of violations, abuses and harms requiring redress. 29. These differences play out as follows: criminal trials, truth commissions and reparations programmes all rest upon certain institutional preconditions that are not satisfied in all settings. Furthermore, those measures are effective instruments for redressing certain kinds of violations and not others. The transfer of the model from the post-authoritarian context to the (post-)conflict setting has taken place with virtually no functional analysis. 30. The same applies to guarantees of non-recurrence: the institutional context, its characteristics, capacities and history all matter, as do the cultural circumstances and individual dispositions. Preventing mass violations does not call for the same specific measures regardless of those factors. Similarly, the (risk of) prevalence of some (patterns of) violations should naturally shape a prevention policy for a given country. 31. In addition, transitional processes are dynamic. Therefore, besides allowing for functional adequacy between means and ends and suitability to context, the design of the policies to implement transitional justice elements should take into account fittingness to a certain stage in a process. Thus, what is necessary and feasible for prevention changes over time, not only as institutional characteristics change, but also as the horizon of possibilities shifts. 32. Furthermore, the sort of transformations that are called for in order to approximate anything resembling guarantees of non-recurrence following mass violations cannot be achieved through “institutional engineering” or institutional reforms alone. The challenge of achieving justice retrospectively and prospectively is not merely a technical one. Lasting societal transformations require interventions not only in the institutional sphere but also in the cultural sphere and at the level of personal, individual dispositions. While culture and “character” play a stabilizing function in social relations, and as such are by nature relatively immune to deliberate change, they are not immutable altogether. Hence, in the present report, the Special 14 8 See Juan E. Méndez, “Accountability for Past Abuses”, Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2, p. 261 (May 1997).