Back to search

PUBL-Publisering/prosjektinform

Reconceptualising Transitional Justice: The Latin American Experience

Awarded: NOK 76,000

The book is the outcome of a three-year international research project on current developments in transitional justice in Latin America, using a comparative approach to examine trajectories in truth, justice, reparations and amnesties in countries emerging from periods of massive violations of human rights and humanitarian law. The country studies -Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay - have been carried out by a local researcher and an international country specialist. The case studies have applied a common analytical framework, which gives the volume coherence and unity. Lead institutions for the project are Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway, the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo, and Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. The project has been funded by the Research Council of Norway (2010-2014). This is the first book to provide a systematic, qualitative and comparative analysis of transitional justice (TJ) processes in a number of countries, thus setting it apart from the single country cases and (as of recent years) large-N studies that dominate the TJ literature. The clearly defined, yet ambitious and novel, focus of our book is to carefully investigate to what extent there has been a shift from impunity to accountability for human rights violations of the past in Latin America. Rather than strict hypotheses testing, the authors use thick but structured narratives, letting the rich comparative empirical studies speak for themselves and allowing patterns to emerge from, rather than being imposed on, the data. These narratives then are analysed with a comparative lens in the concluding chapter. The concluding chapter also assesses the findings in light of existing theoretical literature on when, why, and how TJ matters for accountability. For more details, see Routledge's homepage at http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781138853249/

Funding scheme:

PUBL-Publisering/prosjektinform

Thematic Areas and Topics

No thematic area or topic related to the project