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Transitional Justice and the Construction of Democracy in an Age of Human Rights: An Introduction

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Human Rights, Transitional Justice, and the Reconstruction of Political Order in Latin America

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Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to the topic of the book, the approach used and its structure. It shows how, unlike other investigations of transitional justice that measure it according to human rights norm implementation, this book approaches the topic from the point of view of democratization and state formation. It argues that transitional justice was both a way to address the conflicts of the past and a way for state actors to respond to and manage present conflicts over that past. It explains the approach of this book, which combines a historian’s appreciation for context (both local and transnational) and agency with a sociological focus on the state and the structural effects of the rise of transitional justice.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sergio Ciancaglini and Martín Granovsky, Nada más que la verdad: El Juicio a las Juntas (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995), 321.

  2. 2.

    Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 191–198.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 197.

  4. 4.

    See Louis Bickford, ‘Transitional Justice,’ in The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, ed. Diana Shelton (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 1045.

  5. 5.

    See, for example, Jan Eckel, Die Ambivalenz des Guten. Menschenrechte in der internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).

  6. 6.

    To give a small overview, there are contributions on conservative actors in Europe embracing human rights after the Second World War to protect their own political values, on global South actors and their engagements with international human rights in the 1960s and beyond as a way of forcing a change in the international community, on the conditions that led to the US embracing human rights in the 1970s, and on the embrace of human rights on the part of Latin American actors struggling against dictatorship. See Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics and the Origins in the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Steven Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Mark Philip Bradley, The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Patrick William Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Jan Eckel, ‘“Under a Magnifying Glass”: The International Human Rights Campaign Against Chile in the Seventies,’ in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  7. 7.

    For an overview, and a different take that emphasizes the 1990s, see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Human Rights and History,’ Past and Present 232 (2016): 279–310.

  8. 8.

    William Michael Schmidli, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and US Cold War Policy Towards Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); James N. Green, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies.

  9. 9.

    Miguel A. Centeno and Augustin E. Ferraro, ‘Republics of the Possible: State Building in Latin America and Spain,’ in State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible, ed. Centeno and Ferraro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 13.

  10. 10.

    See for example Steve Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994).

  11. 11.

    See for example Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena, eds., Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth Versus Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  12. 12.

    Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 213.

  13. 13.

    Hugo Vezzetti, Pasado y presente: Guerra, dictadura, y sociedad en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2003). For the case of South Africa, see Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-apartheid State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  14. 14.

    Greg Grandin, ‘The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History and State Formation in Argentina, Chile and Guatemala,’ The American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (2005): 46–67.

  15. 15.

    Elizabeth Jelín, ‘La Política de la Memoria: el movimiento de derechos humanos y la construcción democrática en la Argentina,’ in Juicio, castigo memorias: Derechos humanos y justicia en la política argentina, ed. Carlos H. Acuña et al. (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1995).

  16. 16.

    Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America: Uruguay and Chile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); David Pion-Berlin, ‘To Prosecute or to Pardon? Human Rights Decisions in the Latin American Southern Cone,’ Human Rights Quarterly 15 (1997); José Zalaquett, ‘Balancing Ethical Imperatives and Political Constraints: The Dilemma of New Democracies Confronting Past Human Rights Violations,’ Hastings Law Journal 43, no. 6 (1992).

  17. 17.

    Eugenia Allier-Montaño and Emilio Crenzel, eds., The Struggle for Memory in Latin America: Recent History and Political Violence (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 2.

  18. 18.

    Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014); Steve J. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London, 1998 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009).

  19. 19.

    Cath Collins, Post-transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 21.

  20. 20.

    Karen Engle, Zinaida Miller, and D. M. Davis, eds., Anti-impunity and the Human Rights Agenda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

  21. 21.

    Francesca Lessa and Leigh Payne, eds., Amnesty in the Age of Human Rights Accountability: Comparative and International Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

  22. 22.

    See Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution; Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights; Lynsay Skiba, ‘Shifting Sites of Argentine Advocacy and the Shape of 1970s Human Rights Debates,’ in The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, ed. Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 107–124.

  23. 23.

    Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights; Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights; Bradley, The World Reimagined; Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue; Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies.

  24. 24.

    Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  25. 25.

    Patrick William Kelly, ‘On the Poverty and Possibility of Human Rights in Latin American History’, Humanity 5, no. 3 (2014): 444–445; Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights.

  26. 26.

    Francesca Lessa, Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay: Against Impunity (New York: Palgrave, 2013); Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle, eds., The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (New York: Palgrave, 2011).

  27. 27.

    Collins, Post-transitional Justice.

  28. 28.

    Karen A. Faulk, In the Wake of Neoliberalism: Citizenship and Human Rights in Argentina (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

  29. 29.

    Nicolas Guilhot, The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order (New York: Colombia University Press, 2005); Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth, The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Naomi Roht-Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). Cf: Collins, Post-transitional Justice.

  30. 30.

    Greg Grandin and Joseph Gilbert, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

  31. 31.

    Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In From the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008).

  32. 32.

    Sebastián Carassai, The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014).

  33. 33.

    Guilhot, The Democracy Makers, 17.

  34. 34.

    See the contributions in Joseph and Nugent, Everyday Forms of State Formation.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 18–19.

  36. 36.

    Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 4.

  37. 37.

    George Steinmetz, ‘Introduction: Culture and the State,’ in State/Culture: State Formation After the Cultural Turn, ed. Steinmetz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 8–9.

  38. 38.

    Mara Loveman, ‘The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power,’ American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 6 (2005): 1657–1658.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 1663.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 1660.

  41. 41.

    Ruti Teitel, ‘Transitional Justice Genealogy,’ Harvard Human Rights Review 16 (2003): 76.

  42. 42.

    Grandin, ‘The Instruction of Great Catastrophe’, 47.

  43. 43.

    Steve J. Stern and Scott Strauss, ed., The Human Rights Paradox: Universality and Its Discontents (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 4.

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  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Michelle Frances Carmody

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Carmody, M.F. (2018). Transitional Justice and the Construction of Democracy in an Age of Human Rights: An Introduction. In: Human Rights, Transitional Justice, and the Reconstruction of Political Order in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78393-2_1

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