This article contributes to the general debate on the processes underpinning transitional justice by analyzing the content and interplay of both the “revolutionary” and transitional dynamics in Burkina Faso. In seeking to understand why certain dynamics are favoured over others in the processes of transitional justice, the author argues that transitional justice is fundamentally a political field in which power relations are exercised between different actors, all of them trying to direct the process for the benefit of their own political interests. To achieve their own goals, they try above all to maximize different forces which can include social, political, legal, or even military forces. Thus, in Burkina Faso, through their successful mobilization of social and political forces during the transitional period, civil society actors and the former opposition were able to direct the transitional justice process toward a “revolutionary” dynamic, that is to say, a desire to break completely with the previous political order. More recently, under the new constitutional Kaboré regime, transitional justice seems to be undergoing a shift in process, reflecting the prioritisation of a political realism which favours the political interests of the regime over the former “revolutionary” dynamic.