In Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, Paulina says that all she wants of her former torturer is a confession. Paulina's husband, Gerardo, cautions: ‘People can die of an excessive dose of the truth, you know’ (p. 279). Gerardo's warning about the possible lethal consequences of free-flowing truth is the focus of Unsettling Accounts, an important study of countries transitioning to democracy following repression, including state terrorism.

In this wide-ranging, nuanced and provocative contribution to the literature on transitional justice, Payne challenges those scholars, among whom she names Jon Elster and Stephen Holmes, who argue that unrestricted debate over a country's recent repressive past threatens democratic consolidation or continuity. She argues that open and vigorous contestation of truth between human rights violators and supporters of the former regime, on one hand, and human rights movements and their allies, on the other, actually reinforces democracy rather than undermining it. Confessions of state violence are potentially very unsettling because they often bring out gruesome details of torture, murder and disappearance, or by omitting the specifics leave audiences to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks. These confessions, or ‘unsettling accounts’, create ‘contentious coexistence’, or a ‘conflictual dialogic approach to democracy in deeply divided societies’, which in turn ‘enhances democratic practices by provoking political participation, contestation, and competition’ (p. 3). Intense debate can lead to broadened acceptance by old regime supporters of human rights vocabulary and, as information about past repression circulates openly, nudge all but the hardest liners toward a more moderate position.

Payne focuses on repressors' confessions, which she calls ‘performances’. She analyses print, televised and radio-broadcast confessions using interviews, content and discourse analysis, and comparative historical approaches. The result is a captivating journey through the repressive pasts and conflictive presents of Argentina, Chile, Brazil and South Africa – a travelogue through the barbarous last third of the twentieth century.

Each of the eight featured confessions is labelled according to Payne's analytical scheme. She begins with the 1995 televised performance of retired Argentine naval officer Adolfo Scilingo (remorseful), who participated in death flights from the ESMA detention centre and whose story was disseminated in Horacio Verbitzky's El vuelo. Another Argentine naval officer, the so-called blonde angel of death Alfredo Astiz (heroic), confessed in a very different tone, defending his patriotic actions in saving the patria from Marxist aggression. Shifting to Chile, Payne first analyses the confession of Osvaldo ‘el guatón’ Romo (sadistic), a well-known DINA torturer who alternately denies and admits his role and who particularly enjoyed sexually torturing women. Then DINA commander Manual Contreras (denial) rejects the charges against him and tries to shift responsibility to his boss Pinochet.

The cases from Brazil stretch the ordinary understanding of confessions. The first involves the military collectively (silence), which consistently refuses to comment on human rights violations during its dictatorship. The other is an autobiographical novel by former colonel Pedro Corrêa Cabral (fiction and lies) on the disappearance of over one hundred young revolutionaries in the Amazon jungle in the early 1970s. Payne suggests that fiction can be an effective form of confession in that it is not subject to the scrutiny applied to most other confessional forms. Finally, the book examines two confessions (amnesia and betrayal) from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Following the featured confession, each chapter concludes comparatively by analysing confessions in similar styles from the four primary countries as well as Bosnia and the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

The author emphasises that none of these confessions is direct, clean and comprehensive. Regardless of how they are labelled, all except perhaps the Brazilian military's are ambiguous and likely to change over the duration of the repressor's public engagement, and all are ultimately intended to serve the confessor's interest, not the cause of truth.

Casting the net as widely as Payne does invites the occasional error of fact or interpretation, a few of which might mislead the reader. The Chilean truth commission did not grant amnesty (p. 4). Amnesty in Chile dated from the military's 1978 decree-law, which could only be repealed by legislative or judicial action – both impossible throughout most of the 1990s. The figure of 10,000 tortured, killed and disappeared in Argentina (p. 6) ignores both the human rights movement's estimate of 30,000 disappeared and the official tally of over 13,000. Pinochet did not lose a plebiscite over his 1980 constitution (p. 8). The 1988 plebiscite that he lost was on the proposition that he serve eight more years as president. Finally, while some democratic leaders certainly encouraged the damping down of debate over the past at critical moments, Payne does not provide evidence of democratic governments' attempts to legislate silence (p. 35).

Payne indicates that the effect of the confession is conditioned by both the performance itself and by external factors: ‘institutional mechanisms (staging), political context (timing), and public response (audience)’ (p. 289). While the confessions are masterfully analysed from every possible angle – from content and style of the language down to confessors' facial expressions, body language, coiffures and dress – additional attention to external factors would have helped more effectively to explain the differing impacts the confessions had, why some (the Argentine and South African) truly were ‘unsettling accounts’ and others (the Chilean and Brazilian) were not.

To test Payne's thesis that free debate over the past fortifies democracy, one would have to measure the vitality and rootedness of democracy in the four countries. Since the confessions produced ‘contentious coexistence’ in Argentina and South Africa, and Pinochet's arrest in London and subsequent legal proceedings – not Romo's and Contreras's confessions – yielded the same result in Chile, we might expect democracy to be more fragile in Brazil than in the other three countries. This may be true, but the book leaves that determination to the reader.

Payne has broken fertile new ground in this compelling book. The novel use of confessions to bridge the experiences of transitional justice and democratic consolidation across national and cultural boundaries provides important insights into these processes that could fruitfully be applied to the dozens of additional countries grappling with the aftermath of highly repressive or state terrorist regimes. And while the book does not clearly verify Payne's core thesis, it certainly calls into question Gerardo's warning about the dangers of unlimited truth.