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.

6. Oblivion and memory in the redemocratized Southern cone

Through various lenses and theoretical approaches, this book explores the contested experiences, meanings, realms, goals, and challenges associated with the construction, preservation, and transmission of the memories of state repression in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.

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.

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.

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.

"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.