This book explores how new governments and societies deal with a legacy of past repression, in Portugal, Spain, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and Germany after reunification, as well as Russia, the Southern Cone of Latin America and Central America, as well as South Africa. It looks at official truth commissions, trials and amnesties and purges and unofficial social initiatives to deal with the past. The book also assesses the significance of forms of reckoning with the past for a process of democratic deepening as well as the importance of international actors in shaping policies to deal with past legacies in some of the countries examined.

This insightful new work analyses the attempts by Chile and Uruguay to resolve the human rights violations conflicts inherited from military dictatorships. The author focuses on how the post-transitional democratic governments dealt with demmands for official recognition of the truth about the human rights violations committed by the military regimes and for punishment of those guilty of committing or ordering those offences. Alexandra DeBrito sheds light on the political conditions which permitted - or prevented - the politics of truth-telling and justice under these successor regimes. This is the first study to make comparative assessment of human rights abuse in Uruguay and Chile in this way. The author contends that the experiences of these countries offer formative examples of attempts to tackle fundamental aspects of the policies of transition and democratization. She makes an original contribution to our understanding of the key political, legal, and moral issues involved.