Rigby considers a number of different ways of coming to terms with the past: forgetting about it; holding trials or simple purges; setting up a truth commission; paying reparations. He briefly considers the effect of these various options as they have played out in different cases: Germany and Western Europe after World War II, Spain after the Franco dictatorship, Chile after Pinochet, Argentina after the “dirty war,” Eastern Europe after communism, South Africa after apartheid, and others. His goal is the creation of “a new culture of respect for human difference and human rights—what some might term a culture of peace as opposed to a culture of violence” (p. 183).

The book reveals an intelligent skepticism about all these policy options; for instance, some Latin American truth commissions were not allowed to single out perpetrators by name (p. 9). “There is an ongoing tension between the need for truth, the quest for justice, and the desire for peace” (p. 12). Justice is not an absolute value for Rigby; it does not trump all other political concerns. More specifically, following Samuel P. Huntington's The Third Wave (1991), Rigby argues that “wherever the transition has been negotiated rather than imposed, some kind of amnesty is almost inevitable, particularly if the parties to the settlement continue to possess the capacity to shatter the peace” (p. 184).

Rigby does not just think this tradeoff is inevitable; he suggests that it may, perversely, be helpful. His most intriguing argument is that dwelling on terrible events in the past may not be a wise way to deal with them: “I am not convinced of the appropriateness of opening up the past and talking about it as a means of dealing with the hurt” (p. 1). He even notes that he has lost loved ones in terrible circumstances: “I will not forget them; to do so would dishonor them in some way. But I do not want the pain of those times to come back” (p. ix). This runs contrary to the therapeutic argument popular among some human rights advocates, who see truth commissions and trials as cathartic opportunities for the surviving victims to face and thereby overcome past traumas.

But Rigby does not always stick to these guns. Toward the end of the book he also argues that victims need to be “heard and validated” in order for members of a shattered society to build “a new definition and relationship that acknowledges difference but on the basis of a shared identity as survivors and as human beings” (p. 186). He also suggests that France has been too quick to close the book on its Vichy past, and Spain was wrong to engage in “a collective exercise in public amnesia” (p. 54) about Franco's regime in order to proceed with the establishment of parliamentary democracy. This sounds more like the therapeutic argument he earlier seemed to be against. In a splendid book, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (2001), Priscilla B. Hayner gives a more sustained and richer account of the difficulties of pursuing truth, and she points out it is not clear whether truth commissions provide the kind of therapeutic effects that Rigby sometimes attributes to them.

Unlike Hayner, Rigby relies almost exclusively on secondary sources. There is always a potential tradeoff between depth and breadth. The liveliest chapter is the only one for which he has done primary work: on Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel. He condemns the internecine violence among Palestinians, many of whom are targeted for personal rather than political reasons, as “the worst kind of lynch law” (p. 147; see also Mark Tessler, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1994, pp. 747–8, and Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People, 1993, p. 268). For the rest of the cases, Rigby covers a lot of ground in a relatively slender book, which shows a laudable ability to synthesize broadly; but this comes at the expense of digging more deeply into the cases.

This book adds to a growing discussion. The question of the therapeutic effects of trials is one that might usefully be supplemented by the work of psychologists, as well as by a reconciliation specialist such as Rigby, all of them joining in what is increasingly a multidisciplinary area for study.