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The general aim of this book is to shed light on how countries deal with legacies of repression during a transition from authoritarian or totalitarian rule to democratic rule. Two broad kinds of transition are covered: those that occur as a result of the collapse of the old regimes or regime forces, as in Portugal, Argentina, Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Germany after reunification, where collapse was followed by absorption into another state; and those that are negotiated between an incoming democratic elite and an old regime, as in Spain, the southern cone of Latin America, Central America and South Africa. Because of this range of transitional situations, it is possible to see how varying degrees of political, social and institutional constraints affect the solutions adopted or limit opportunities to deal with the past, and to permit a comparative analysis of the variety of policies adopted, establishing links between one and the other. The book concentrates on the presence (or absence) of three kinds of official or government-sponsored efforts to come to terms with the past: truth commissions, trials and amnesties, and purges; to a lesser extent, it also looks at policies of compensation, restitution or reparation. At the same time, it focuses on unofficial and private initiatives emerging from within society to deal with the past – usually promoted by human rights organizations (HROs), churches, political parties and other civil society organizations; in doing this, the book examines a ‘politics of memory’ whereby societies rework the past in a wider cultural arena, both during the transitions and after official transitional policies have been implemented and even forgotten. The different sections of the Introduction are: Truth and Justice in Periods of Political Change: An Overview; What Can be Done about an Authoritarian Past? Limits and Possibilities of Transition Types and Other Variables; Beyond the Transitional Period: Authoritarian and Long-Term Historical Legacies; Truth, Justice and Democracy; and Memory Making and Democratization.

This chapter examines how Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile fared with truth and justice policies after the transition from authoritarian rule, looking at the issue from an institutional and political angle, and at the social politics of memory. Efforts to deal with the past and their significance in the overall politics of transition to democracy are shaped by country-specific historical conditions and developments: the nature and legacies of repression and authoritarian rule; and the nature of the transition process and the various political, institutional and legal factors conditioning the post-transitional period, among which are the nature of repression, the presence and strength of a human rights movement, inherited legal or constitutional limitations, relations between political parties and Human Rights Organizations (HROs), the degree of executive or party commitment to policies of truth and justice, the unity of democratic parties, the ability of the military to mobilise against any policies of accountability as well as their relations with the democratic executive, the attitude of the judiciary to past violations, the presence of a strong legislative right, and the degree to which repression penetrated the social fabric. The way in which the first democratically elected authorities deal with the past, together with the relative strength of the human rights movement in the post-transitional period, sets the agenda for the subsequent evolution of the issue; more specifically, the past remains a source of open conflict if there are loopholes in official policies that preclude full closure or amnesty, and if transnational groups or regional and international human rights bodies challenge national policies favouring impunity. The past also remains a source of conflict if there are strong HROs that continue to contest official decisions on how to deal with the past, and have allies in the formal political arena or the courts. Official policies to deal with the past are not of themselves directly relevant to the process of democratisation, and what is more, during the first transitional period, truth and justice policies are unrelated to (or may even place obstacles in the way of) wider institutional reform; the reverse is also true, but whatever the case, the past becomes part of the dynamic of democratic politics. Indeed, although the continued pursuit of truth and justice and its links to wider reforms may be difficult to establish across the board, the politics of memory more widely conceived are important for a process of democratization in all four countries examined here, as it is about how a society interprets and appropriates its past, in an attempt to mould its future, and as such it is an integral part of any political process, including progress towards deeper democracy.

The main aim of this book has been to analyse what determines how new democracies face an authoritarian past (and human rights violations in particular) and, in turn, the way in which policies of truth and justice shape the process of democratization. Thus, eighteen cases are analysed in detail, covering a good part of the processes of democratization that have taken place since the beginning of the 1970s; countries experiencing a political change that did not undergo a transition to democracy have been left out, as have countries in which truth and justice policies are the result of the end of a civil conflict where there is no accompanying movement towards democratization. The key obstacle to theorizing about this topic is the enormous influence of the particular historical evolution of each country, and various factors emerging therefrom, on policies of truth and justice in transition. Thus, a general overview to categorize different experiences of transitions from dictatorial rule according to the balance of power between authoritarians and democrats is immediately useful, although the aim of the editors has been to keep sight of the peculiar nature of national experiences while providing some kind of useful guidelines for approaching the subject. It is in this spirit that the two sets of conclusions offered here provide a way of looking at the issue of transitional truth and justice: the first pertains to the probability that a new democracy will undertake policies of this kind; the second refers to the consequences that such policies may have for democratic life or democratization.

This chapter considers the role of ‘memory politics’ – understood as the combination of official and unofficial attempts to deal with the legacy of past violations – in the struggle for democratization in Central America: official initiatives can include truth commissions, amnesty dispensations, criminal investigations and prosecutions, and a range of institutional reforms aimed at redressing the previous failure of the state to guarantee human rights; unofficial initiatives developed by civil society actors to confront the past can include investigations of violations, legal actions, and different kinds of commemorative acts and exercises in collective memory. Memory politics operates at multiple levels and involves a diversity of agents, including local communities, national and international non-governmental human rights organizations (HROs), governments, the media, and, in the case of Central America, the UN; however, it is suggested here that its long-term effects in any national context depend on the interaction between official and unofficial efforts to address the legacies of the past. The experiences of memory politics analysed in this chapter are those of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the three Central American countries that during the 1990s undertook official processes of investigating past violations of human rights. The precise nature of memory politics and the impact it has had varied considerably in these three countries, and it is suggested that four interrelated factors are central to explaining differences between the respective national experiences: the first is the specific political and social legacies of human rights abuse in each country; the second concerns the circumstances of the transition from war to peace, specifically the prevailing balance of forces and the trade-off between truth and justice that this engendered in each case; the third is the role of local HROs and civil society in general in the politics of memory; and the fourth is the role of international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in efforts to uncover the truth about the past and to address the consequences of violations. The first three sections of the chapter compare the legacies of human rights abuses, the transitional trade-offs between truth and justice, and the role of civil society organizations and international actors in the memory politics of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; the final section considers the impact of memory politics on the prospects for democracy in these countries.

The military coup of 25 April 1974 in Portugal initiated the ‘third wave’ of democratic transitions in southern Europe. The transition and subsequent process of democratic consolidation evolved in various stages, each with a corresponding phase of ‘transitional truth and justice’ initiatives and counter-initiatives: the first stage, from 1974 to 1976, was the ‘revolutionary’ period, comprising the downfall of the regime and the crisis of state that followed; the second stage, between 1976 and 1982, was a period of ‘normalization’, constitutionalization and incipient democratic consolidation; during the third stage, from 1982 onwards, the process of democratic consolidation has proceeded apace. This chapter examines these stages in different sections: Introduction; A Portuguese Settling of Accounts; The Purge Process; The Dual Legacy Discourse and the Consolidation of Democracy; and Conclusion.

Chapter 13 examines micro-level components shaping the witness experience. It develops a model of procedural justice to examine witness perceptions about the search for historical truth and justice. Based on extensive survey data from witnesses who testified before the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the study evaluates in depth the impact of testifying. The chapter uses logistic regression to evaluate whether certain testimonial challenges such as trial delays, language translation difficulties, and other stressors associated with the process of testifying contribute to perceptions about about witnesses’ contributions to truth and justice. Notably, we find ethnic and gender differences among the witnesses regarding whether they believed they have contributed to truth and justice by having testified, and the findings reveal limited support for the proposition that if witnesses feel they have been treated fairly they are more likely to believe they have contributed to justice.

Chapter 3 asks how the intimate universal might have a significant bearing on the practice of philosophy itself. Many immediately think of philosophers as the high priests of the universal, but these high priests do not always convince non-philosophers, be they artists or religious believers. if sometimes the philosophers demand from the intimacies of religion and art that they prove themselves in connection with the universal, here the call is directed to philosophy itself, as a practice of truth, to prove that its service of the universal is in the spirit of the most intimate truthfulness. To this end, Desmond connects the philosophical service of the universal with a more intimate sense of “doing justice” that is prior to the more usual juxtaposition of theory and practice.

Frédéric Vairel offers a comparison between transitional justice processes in Tunisia and Morocco. He shows how the Moroccan Equity and Reconciliation Commission established in 2004, the first in an Arab country, inspired and partly informed Tunisia’s Truth and Justice Commission. He discusses the similarities and differences between the two entities and their actions. While in authoritarian Morocco, the top-down process through which the commission was created allowed it to work reasonably well, though with quite limited results, its Tunisian counterpart followed a much more ambitious roadmap but was not able to function efficiently due to the politicization of transitional justice in Tunisia’s new democratizing context.

This chapter examines the political strategies and organizing that shaped black women radicals' activism in the celebrated fight to free Rosa Lee Ingram, a black woman convicted, along with two of her sons, of murdering a white man in rural Georgia. It highlights black women's leadership in organizing to win the Ingrams' freedom and in publicly asserting black women's right to self-defense and control over their bodies. These women situated their activism within the postwar context, as well as within black women's long history of sexualized violence. Working through the Civil Rights Congress, the Women's Committee for Equal Justice, and the all-black women's organization Sojourners for Truth and Justice, Yvonne Gregory, Beulah Richardson, and other women crafted a political analysis that sought to broaden the scope of civil rights activism. Through such efforts, these women fought to assert black women's leadership and vision in shaping postwar civil rights politics.

This chapter explores how the founding of the Progressive Party (PP) in 1948 was a significant milestone in the lives of Eslanda Goode Robeson, Shirley Graham, and Charlotta Bass, helping to mark their evolution from social activists to public intellectuals. Their success in uniting race and gender emancipation ideologies and connecting them to world peace with the support of mixed-sex, racially integrated organizations complicates critiques that nationalist movements have historically discouraged women's attempts to address feminist concerns. Furthermore, the work of these women in the PP, and in organizations like the Council on African Affairs (CAA) and the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, demonstrates a comprehensive strategy to operate within both political and social movements in an attack against the dehumanizing effects of white supremacy and for the promise of global peace.