This paper presents a critique of mainstream transitional justice theory, which is built on the underlying assumption that transitions entail a shift from non-liberal to liberal democratic regimes. The complex ways in which criminal prosecutions of former regime members have been used in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen provide new insight that has an important bearing on the classical understanding of transitional justice. This paper builds on Thomas Obel-Hansen’s argument that liberal regimes use transitional justice to consolidate democracy and to strengthen the rule of law, while non-liberal regimes use them to “facilitate restrictions on freedoms and consolidate non-democratic and repressive rule.” (Obel-Hansen 2011) This is in contrast to Ruti Teitel’s argument that criminal justice is a “ritual of liberalizing states.” (Teitel, 2000). This paper offers a critique of transitional justice literature that is overwhelmingly based on the understanding that transitional justice occurs in liberalizing contexts. The critique is largely based on findings from field research on the prosecution of political leaders in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen between 2012 and 2014, and on scholarly texts. This paper draws three interrelated conclusions. First, the experiences of the Arab Spring countries run counter to the mainstream transitional justice theory propagated by Teitel and others. They instead demonstrate that transitional justice mechanisms – and in particular criminal prosecutions – have been used and abused to solidify non-liberal transitions in their varied forms. Second, these four countries are examples of the need to further examine whose interests transitional justice serves and what these interests are, as Obel-Hansen suggests. Such an analysis is important for the deconstruction of the use and abuse of transitional justice in certain political contexts. Third, most criminal prosecutions in the Arab Spring countries have dealt almost exclusively with ‘crimes of the transition’ as opposed to crimes during the decades of repressive rule prior to the political transitions that took place. These practices have profound implications for the study of transitional justice because they weaken long-standing scholarly assumptions of the liberalizing directions of transitional justice.