Recent years have seen an extraordinary proliferation of efforts to deal with the injustices of war, genocide, and dictatorship: over 30 truth commissions, two international tribunals and now a permanent international criminal court, numerous national trials, vetting schemes, perpetrators' confessions, official apologies, reparations settlements, forgiveness, memorials, memoirs, and civil society projects. By now an equally extensive scholarly literature has arisen to describe and judge these efforts. Two recent books, Justice as Prevention and Unsettling Accounts, join this effort. Each depicts a single practice in “dealing with the past” that occurs across many sites, showing how such efforts are carried out, charting the controversies to which each gives rise, and asking whether each produces justice.

One of these books, Leigh Payne's Unsettling Accounts, takes up what is perhaps the most sensational and jarring of practices for dealing with the past: perpetrators' public confessions of their past misdeeds. Confession is not apology. Only sometimes does it involve renunciation or remorse, Payne explains. Indeed, one of the most impressive aspects of her book is its typology of the forms that confession takes. Sometimes it does involve remorse, as it did for Serbia's Biljana Plavšić or black apartheid policeman Thapo Mbelo, who met with mothers of his victims following his appearance at South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (p. 57, 62–63). But remorse can also meet with skepticism or controversy among its intended audiences. Other times perpetrators utter confession “heroically,” defending or celebrating their deeds, as did former Argentinian naval captain Alfredo Astiz (p. 75–92). Confession can be simply sadistic, as when apartheid policeman Jeffrey Benzien simulated his “wet bag” torture technique on the floor of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (pp. 229–239). Some perpetrators deny that they committed the deeds in question or that these deeds were wrong. Some attempt to be silent about these deeds; some of these are later exposed. Some admit their deeds only after critics force them to. Sometimes perpetrators tell of their crimes through fiction. Others simply lie. Still others, like former commander of South Africa's Vlakplaas Eugene de Kock, confess as a way of betraying or paying back colleagues who wronged them.

What do confessions accomplish? Usually not what they intend, Payne shows through her careful analysis of the public discourse surrounding confessions in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and South Africa following their transitions to democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s. Publics disbelieve remorse; human rights advocates present evidence against perpetrators' denials; fellow generals and officers dispute their former colleague's confession.

What confessions bring about, according to Payne, is rather what she conveys through her aptly chosen title and subtitle. Payne takes issue with theorists and advocates who believe that practices of transitional justice “settle accounts”—that is, beget closure, truth, healing, reconciliation, and a societal consensus about past injustices and present justice. Quite the opposite, she avers, confessions typically evoke disputation and fractiousness.

So are transitional societies better off without confessions? No, Payne argues, for quelling them would choke off the good that they accomplish—which is not closure, but the very “contentious co-existence” that characterizes healthy democracy. The arguments that confessions provoke will not likely be settled or even produce better policy, but they instantiate the very deliberation that constitutes democracy, strip the powerful of their ability to control information and perceptions, and re-establish victims' equal citizenship, all in contrast to the previous dictatorship.

Payne defends her argument through meticulous research and creative methods, drawing on literary, media, and dramatic theory in tracing the strategies through which perpetrators present themselves to publics as well as the complex and unpredictable conversation that ensues. Without sacrificing social scientific sophistication she deploys the skills of an expert journalist, for instance in her deft portrayal of perpetrators as neither moral monsters nor hapless minions but rather as complex human beings endowed with both emotions and wiles. Altogether, she succeeds in composing what deserves to be considered one of the leading social scientific works in the contemporary field of transitional justice and even more broadly a model for how to conduct analysis of public deliberation.

Still, there is room for disagreement. An advocate of a sophisticated concept of reconciliation might well dispute her portrayal of reconciliation as naively seeking closure or settled accounts. When asked if South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was too ambitious, Archbishop Desmond Tutu reminded his questioner that the motto of the commission was “promoting reconciliation,” not “achieving reconciliation.” Reconciliation is not only an end state of restored relationship, but also a process of restoring relationship that can be more or less achieved. It can also be construed as involving multiple dimensions of healing, including acknowledgment, reparations, apology, and forgiveness. Conceived thus, it is possible for reconciliation to be achieved in one way but not another and to a partial degree in any one of these ways.

Despite her argument that no more than contentious coexistence ought to be expected from confession, Payne's narrative is shot through with examples of restorations of persons and relationships, albeit ones that are partial and complex. She relates again and again how the debate provoked by confessions, even skewed and insincere confessions, elicits knowledge of the circumstances of their suffering that victims did not previously enjoy as well as acknowledgment of this suffering on the part of fellow citizens and the state. In the large majority of cases, the discourse surrounding perpetrators' confessions defeats, or at least diminishes, the “standing victory” of their injustice, that is, the sense in which they perhaps enjoy prestige and their deeds legitimacy. And again, in some cases, remorse was in fact genuine, effecting a degree of healing in the perpetrator's own soul. All of these restorations bring about goods that are themselves something more than coexistence, even if they are always achieved piecemeal.

The other book, Justice as Prevention, by Alexander Mayer-Rieckh and Pablo de Greiff, examines the practice of vetting, defined in the introductory chapter as “processes for assessing an individual's integrity as a means of determining his or her suitability for public employment” (p. 17). Occurring in the aftermath of a transition to democracy or peace, vetting can result in either the firing or a bar to the hiring of employees in an agency of government or other organization such as a university. Like Payne's book, this one treats one approach to dealing with past injustices that countries across the world have adopted and offers a strong sense of the how the practice has succeeded, failed, and varied. An edited volume, it does not contain a unifying argument analogous to Payne's, but rather comes across as a handbook, an “everything you need to know about” text that will be useful for a practitioner or student of transitional justice who is interested in the problem of vetting.

The volume's chief virtue is its thoroughness. A superb introduction by Roger Duthie outlines nine basic “decisions” that every vetting process must make regarding criteria for misconduct, design of the process, sanctions, and the like. This is followed by nine country case studies, each written by an expert on the particular country, together covering the major sites in which vetting has taken place. Vetting has occurred most robustly in transitions from communism in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Germany. A different context—with important consequences for the conduct of vetting, several authors stress—is post-conflict settings, such as those found in Bosnia and El Salvador. Less ambitious but still interesting schemes can be found in Argentina, Greece, and South Africa. These nine cases offer the reader a global account of vetting in all of its particulars.

Four conceptual essays then follow, treating general themes involved in vetting. Essays by each of the two editors address the foundational question: in what sense does vetting promote justice? De Greiff distinguishes between three different outcomes: punitive justice, deterrence, and preventive justice. Observing that vetting has an undeniably punitive dimension, he argues that it should not be seen as a substitute for criminal processes. He also points out that as an empirical matter, it is highly unclear whether vetting deters. Rather, the best argument for vetting—which both de Greiff and Mayer-Reickh stress—is its role in building just institutions. By excluding from positions of authority those who have acted in deeply unjust ways, de Grieff argues, vetting defangs opposition to the rule of law and democracy as well as resistance to other transitional mechanisms like truth-telling, prosecutions, and reparations. Most powerfully, vetting creates trust in new or reformed institutions on the part of citizens.

Vetting also has a dark side, as several of the essays stress. In considering the guilt of every individual rather than imputing guilt to people on account of their mere membership in a party or bureaucracy, vetting differs from purges. But sometimes the line becomes blurred, as it did in the Czech Republic's lustration process. An essay by Federico Andreu-Guzmán on due process discusses the laws and procedures that protect individuals from overzealous cleansing processes.

Both of these books, then, consider one particular process that countries take up in dealing with past injustices. Both can be credited for not only plumbing empirically the complex politics that each process propels but also for taking up the normative question, assessing how each process does—or does not—bring about justice. Though the literature on transitional justice is swelling in size, both books fill an open niche. Even this growing corpus contains only a handful of rigorous, first-rate university press monographs. Payne's book stands among these and, to boot, creatively maps out a practice to which other scholars have given little attention. Mayer-Rieckh and De Greiff's book also charts an underexplored practice, though for an audience that is populated proportionately more by practitioners. Most importantly, the practices that each book covers are likely to remain important in the global politics of transitional justice well into the future.