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Since its return to democracy, Argentina has made great efforts to address the legacy of the last military dictatorship. This paper presents a complete overview of the Argentinean policy of economic reparations for the victims of human rights violations committed between 1975-1983, including the beneficiaries, the crimes for which victims received reparations, the amounts paid, and the forms of payment. It analyzes the motivations for redressing the victims, from both national and international perspectives. It identifies the positions adopted by the different actors involved in the measures, especially the State and human rights organizations. The latter gained undeniable legitimacy by representing the victims and has consolidated into a group that has become the main actor on issues related to the legacy of the military dictatorship. The paper also focuses on economic, legal, and political questions that have arisen during the process of designing and implementing the reparation policy.

This chapter addresses the questions: why should poor countries be expected to repay the debts imposed upon them by unelected and repressive governments? Who should shoulder the burden of repaying the billions of dollars stolen by the likes of Mobutu, Marcos, and Saddam Hussein? How can creditors expect South Africans to pay for loans taken out during the apartheid regime and at that time used as a means of oppression? It argues that loans to certain borrowers or for certain purposes are prima facie illegitimate. This category includes loans to dictators, odious debt (debt used for repression), and extortionate loans. Second, certain types of behavior by lenders can also make a loan illegitimate: usury, money laundering, and gross negligence in lending. When these conditions are met, responsibility for repayment cannot be properly placed on the borrower.

The first year of Putin's presidency resulted in the most concerted and fundamental shake‐up of federal relations since 1993. Putin ended the bilateral treaty process and vowed to create a ‘Dictatorship of Law’. Putin's reforms are examined in detail, including the creation of presidential envoys (polpredy) and federal districts, the quasi‐judicial use of presidential decrees (ukazy), reform of the Council of the Federation, growing federal influence of regional executives and legislatures, and local self‐government. These dramatic changes led to the reform of republican constitutions and a new stage in federal‐regional relations.

This chapter examines the changing leadership of Vladimir Putin. Most observers initially saw Putin as a transactional leader; with his practical and technocratic approach to fixing problems, he appeared more a prudent manager than political leader. However, as he moved towards his second term, his increased assertion of executive powers has prompted some observers to revise their optimism regarding Russia’s prospects for democracy, viewing Putin’s actions as a possible turn towards dictatorial rule.

In all processes of political change the emerging regime must face the difficult task of deciding what to do with the legacies of the former dictatorship, which people were working for the previous civil and military administration preserve, and whether or not to put on trial those responsible for having violated human rights under the previous regime. This chapter analyses what was done, and what was deliberately put aside in the Spanish case. The Spanish transition to democracy has been praised as mainly exemplary, and as demonstrating success in the stabilization of the new democratic regime. However, the final positive result should not obscure the fact that, because of the correlation of forces of the transitional period, and also because of the traumatic collective memory of the Spanish civil war, the victims of the Francoist repression were not properly rehabilitated and the dictatorship was not condemned in the Spanish parliament until 2002. In fact, a very broad Amnesty Law was passed in 1977 that not only allowed all ETA prisoners to get out of jail, but also impeded the judicial revision of the dictatorial past. None of these limitations have impeded the consolidation of democracy in Spain, but some important sectors of society feel that justice has not been done, which explains the very recent political, social and even cultural initiatives to face the authoritarian past.

As the Jews were deported, a page in Hitler's dictatorship was turned as new ‘racially foreign’ people, literally millions of foreign workers, were brought into Germany to labour for the Reich. The racist regime regarded Poles and other peoples from the east as racially inferior. They had to be used to win the war, but at all costs they had to be prevented from mixing with German blood. The authorities decided on nothing short of an ‘apartheid’ system, to keep these ‘race enemies’ in their place. This chapter discusses how this massive exploitative effort unleashed new social dynamics.

This chapter identifies the precursors of intergroup reconciliation or, more realistically, of an orientation toward reconciliation. It reviews literature on reconciliation and complements it with a theoretical framework of intergroup reconciliation. Finally, the chapter considers research in support and extension of this framework that was conducted in the contexts of the Northern Irish conflict, the Chilean experience of political transition from dictatorship to democracy, and relations between the indigenous and nonindigenous Chileans.

This chapter discusses the end of Hitler's dictatorship. Social support for Hitler and for National Socialism steadily eroded as the war encroached more and more into German life, and many people certainly became fed up. Nazi propaganda played upon German fears about what would happen if or when the Soviets arrived on German territory, in order to try to strengthen the determination to resist. The warning of retribution to come for Nazi barbarities committed in the Soviet Union led many Germans to flee to the west. Those who could not or would not go were overrun by the Soviet advance. Hitler's political testament, written up on 29 April in the bunker, stated that he would rather die than be taken prisoner and deposed, and he asked his successors to do what they could to strengthen the spirit of resistance and continue the war. Before he committed suicide, he appointed a new government and stripped Himmler and Göring of their offices for opening negotiations with the Allies.

This chapter summarizes the discussions in the preceding chapters. It details the three phases of the process by which the German people came to support Hitler and the Nazi dictatorship: the first from his appointment in 1933 to 1938–9; the second ran from the outbreak of the war to the beginning of the invasion in 1944; and the final phase went from there to the end.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to trace the events that occurred in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. It shows how and why a social consensus emerged in favour of Hitler and Nazism within months of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. This consensus took many forms, and was fluid rather than firm, active rather than passive, differently constituted according to context and theme, and constantly in the process of being formed. The book also details how anti-Semitism changed and slowly spread after 1933, and how media reports and press stories were an essential dimension of life and death in Hitler's dictatorship.

This chapter discusses the activities of the Nazi police. By the end of the pre-war era, if not before, the Nazi police (especially the Gestapo and Kripo) began to take very seriously their new mission to cleanse the body politic of ‘harmful’, or ‘degenerative elements’ in society. In that sense they took on wholly unprecedented, racist-informed, preventive tasks as they moved into the field of social biology. The vision the police adopted was of a conflict-free society from which would be eliminated all social and biological carriers of ‘harmful’ behaviour. These changing missions were not merely worked out behind the scenes, and put into practice in secret, but by and large they were explained in the German press to win support for the dictatorship.

From the earliest days of the Third Reich, Hitler's dictatorship was overshadowed by thoughts and plans for the war that he and his collaborators regarded as inevitable. Almost immediately in 1933, Hitler forged ahead on the diplomatic and military front — winning accolades from the people at every turn, especially as he tore up the hated peace treaty forced on Germany in 1919. His aim was not peace, but war, and as he prepared for it, he thought in terms of a total war in which a trustworthy home front stood firm behind the soldiers on the battlefront. One way of interpreting why Hitler encouraged Himmler to create a new police and camp system was that he saw the elimination of all internal ‘enemies’ as preparation for the coming war.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. One of the objectives of this book has been to draw out the complexities regarding issues of memory within post-dictatorship Chile, especially in terms of the persistence of state violence in the lived subjectivities of dictatorship victims. It has privileged the domain of representations precisely because they are meaningful and multifaceted sites that produce practices of cultural memory in the social field. Rather than mere repositories of memory, these sites offer symbols, testimonies, architectural spaces, images, and narrations of witness about state violence within Chile's public sphere. In addition, they structure and delimit the ways that democracy has failed to account for certain kinds of experiences, including the dramatic military counterrevolution, with grave human consequences.

The municipalization following the Social War must be understood within the context of the political atmosphere in which it emerged, and the major public discourses of the time: the admission and absorption of the new citizens into the Roman res publica, and the closely related struggle for domination between the Marian/Cinnan group and that of Sulla and his adherents. This chapter examines the ‘Italian question’ between the end of the Social War and the dictatorship of Sulla. It argues that this period marks the beginning of the municipalization of those communities enfranchised as a result of the Social War.

This chapter demonstrates how, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, some of those active in efforts to promote human rights feared that the era in which their cause held a prominent place on the world stage could be over. That era began about a quarter of a century earlier as an outgrowth of the Cold War, and it had a part in bringing the Cold War to an end. Dictatorships of the Right and the Left had fallen—with help from those denouncing their abuses of human rights—yet those who hoped that there would be a substantial decline in gross abuses worldwide had been disappointed.

This chapter talks about the fact that during the 1930s and 1940s action theories of balance—conduct codes and handbooks to help new objectivity individual compensate for a basic lack of equilibrium—were put to the severest tests. It notes that in the shadow of dictatorship, the only possible basis for authentic decisions could be the conscience. It adds that intellectuals in exile reacted by recasting codes of conduct that allowed them to reassert the value of humanism. It explains, as taught by Brecht, that codes of conduct can indeed guarantee sheer survival, if at the cost of a joyful spirit. It discusses that to the succeeding generation of the 1960s there seemed nothing better than a fatherless society. It explains that this generation as well took the path of polarization, disintegrating in the 1970s into counterculture, which reinvigorated the cult of authenticity by negation of the fathers, and marginal groupings, which lost themselves for a time in paramilitary political formations.