The Legacy of Human Rights Violations in the Southern Cone


Book Description

The new democracies of the Southern Cone have publicly professed to reject and condemn the uses of the state power in various forms against citizens under military rule, thus dissociating themselves from their predecessors. And yet the experiences of military rule have become a grim legacy, raising major issues and dilemmas to the forefront of the public agenda. The Legacy of Human Rights Violations in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay analyses in a systematic and comparative way the struggles and debates, the institutional paths and crises that took place in these societies following redemocratization in the 1980s and 1990s, as they confronted the legacy of violations committed under previous authoritarian governments and as the democratic administrations tried to balance normative principles and political contingency. The book also traces how these trends affected the development of politics of oblivion and memory and the restructuring of collective identity and solidarity following redemocratization. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. The series will concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series will primarily be Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia.







Post-transitional Justice


Book Description

"Analyzes how activists, legal strategies, and judicial receptivity to human rights claims are constructing new accountability outcomes for human rights violations in Chile and El Salvador"--Provided by publisher.







Dealing with the Legacy of Authoritarianism


Book Description

In recent years the agenda of how to ‘deal with the past’ has become a central dimension of the quality of contemporary democracies. Many years after the process of authoritarian breakdown, consolidated democracies revisit the past either symbolically or to punish the elites associated with the previous authoritarian regimes. New factors, like international environment, conditionality, party cleavages, memory cycles and commemorations or politics of apologies, do sometimes bring the past back into the political arena. This book addresses such themes by dealing with two dimensions of authoritarian legacies in Southern European democracies: repressive institutions and human rights abuses. The thrust of this book is that we should view transitional justice as part of a broader ‘politics of the past’: an ongoing process in which elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the past in terms of what they hope to achieve in the present. This book was published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.




Handbook of Human Rights


Book Description

The Handbook maps out the field of human rights for the humanities and social sciences. It provides a solid foundation for the reader who wants to learn the basic parameters of the field, but also to promote new thinking and frameworks for the future study of human rights in the twenty-first century.




Human Rights in the Americas


Book Description

The existence of human rights helps secure the peace, deter aggression, promote the rule of law, combat crime and corruption, and prevent humanitarian crises. These human rights include freedom from torture, freedom of expression, press freedom, women's rights, children's rights, and the protection of minorities. This book surveys the countries of the Americas and is augmented by a current bibliography and useful indexes by subject, title and author.




Justice Framed


Book Description

A new perspective on the history of transitional justice and why the discourse prioritises particular responses to human rights violations.




Transnational Politics in Central America


Book Description

"Finally, a study that moves beyond abstract assertions of the importance of a transnational perspective to demonstrate compellingly why transnationalism matters in the specific context of Central America. This is a rich, interdisciplinary look at regional history, politics, and society--of immense value for students of Latin American studies and transnationalism alike."--Thomas Legler, coeditor of Promoting Democracy in the Americas Political theorists tend to write about the countries of Central America (Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama) either as individual nation-states or as the pawns and victims of international intervention. What these approaches ignore is the shared history of these countries, which were a single nation until domestic and colonial forces dissolved it in the early nineteenth century. In Transnational Politics in Central America, Luis Roniger argues for the importance of examining the connected history, close relationships and mutual impact of the societies of Central America upon one another. Eschewing well-trod theoretical approaches that do not account for the existence of transnational dynamics before the current stage of globalization, this landmark book identifies recurring trends of state fragmentation and attempts at reunification or social and political association in the region over the past two centuries.




Photography, Truth and Reconciliation


Book Description

Photography, Truth and Reconciliation charts the connections between photography and a crucial issue in contemporary social history. The book examines the prevalence of photography in cultural responses to processes of truth and reconciliation, and argues that photographs are a valuable means through which stories can be retold and historiography can be rethought. Five compelling case studies from Argentina, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Cambodia underscore the special role that this medium has played in facilitating processes of recovery, and in reconstructing suppressed histories, even when a documentary record of the events does not exist. The diverse practices addressed in this book – including artistic, protest, institutional, archival, legal and personal photography – prompt a new consideration of photography’s links to presence, place, time, spectatorship and justice. Collectively, these practices attest to photography’s key role in transitional justice, and in shaping historical understanding internationally. Important reading for students taking photography, visual culture, history and media studies courses, Photography, Truth and Reconciliation explores key historical and theoretical themes, including photography and testimony, international discourses on human rights and justice, and problematic notions of public and collective memory. The introduction and conclusion of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com