In the past decade expectations about how much transitional justice can achieve have grown, and have come to include ambitious and broad objectives such as prevention, societal transformation and social justice. Such outcomes can only – if at all – be imagined if transitional justice interventions are conceived of as steppingstones that kickstart a deeper and broader process of change. Conceptualizing transitional justice interventions as such, has meant that (victim) participation has become more central in most interventions, not just for ethical or epistemic reasons, but also because victims participating in these processes have increasingly been thought of as agents of change who could carry forth the process of justice-seeking after initial transitional justice interventions are terminated. It has also meant that the fourth – and most ephemeral – pillar of transitional justice (guarantees of non-recurrence) has become increasingly important because of its explicitly forward-looking nature and preventive ambition. However, scholarship on how positive impact and transformation at a societal level would come about through a short and often relatively small-scale transitional justice intervention (or through victim participation in it) is scant, and commentators have found it difficult to move beyond aspirational and normative arguments. I argue that to conceptualize, understand, problematize and map this kind of broad and long-term societal impact, we need to be more rigorous in identifying what it is that we expect to change, and how. In this chapter, I propose a focus on the expressive function of transitional justice interventions to link micro-, meso- and macro level processes of change, while still allowing for purposeful and sound operationalization of what we mean by impact.