This volume engages critically with the paradigm of transitional justice (TJ) and its application in Latin America. It identifies three major, interconnected shortcomings of TJ discourses and practice, and examines them through in-depth ethnographic studies of both post-dictatorial and post-conflict societies.

First, the authors emphasise the limited thematic scope of TJ, which has generally paid scant attention to the wider history of structural violence in Latin America, and most importantly to the problems of social inequality and economic exploitation. In their contribution on Peru, José Pablo Bayabar et al. show how TJ reparation programmes have tended to concentrate primarily on financial compensation and overlook education, health, housing and development. Moreover, collective reparation payments to indigenous communities have not been based upon a coherent strategy to enforce long-term economic and cultural programmes, and have often been misused by local politicians (p. 117–19). Steve Dobransky's chapter on El Salvador also emphasises the fact that corrections to economic inequality and to imbalances in land ownership were overlooked by the TJ paradigm because of its neoliberal ideological roots (p. 77–8). Such an approach has had profoundly negative consequences in Central America, where post-war policies of reconstruction have allowed almost unconditional Western investments that have reproduced and even exacerbated social polarisation and economic exploitation.

Second, the book interrogates the temporal framework of TJ and questions the heuristic value of the term ‘transitional’. The concept was coined in relation to periods of radical political change, where governments undertake measures to redress dictatorial abuses and design them as a method of entrenching democratic stability. Scholars and practitioners have gradually extended the concept to cover a variety of temporal frameworks (using it even 30 years after transition) and political contexts (e.g. long-established democracies such as the USA or Canada). Rosario Figari Layus's and Cecilia MacDowell's chapters on Argentina and Brazil respectively question these narratives. Mobilizations for justice in these countries started long before transition and continued many years after its completion. Claiming radical discontinuities within this process overlooks the long-term history and raises the question as to when ‘transitional’ begins and ends. Moreover, such temporal delimitation implies a clear break between the crimes of dictatorial regimes and present-day human rights violations. Or, as various chapters of the book show, violence rooted in authoritarian or conflict contexts continues to flare up in similar or renewed forms long after regime change has occurred. Also, the exceptional condition implied by the TJ paradigm has allowed many Latin American governments to trade justice for peace and maintain an impunity status quo decades after the end of dictatorships and conflicts.

Third, the authors draw attention to the mismatches between TJ narratives created at an international level and the expectations of what they call local ‘marginalized communities and survivors’. Debbie Sharnak's and Rosario Figari Layus's chapters illustrate how in the 1980s and the 1990s Uruguay and Argentina were regarded by the international community as exemplary cases of TJ success, while, at the local level, victims of state terrorism were denouncing the lack of prosecutions and of historical revisionism. Edson Teles and Renan Quinalha further stress that governments in Brazil, though lauded by the international community for establishing a truth commission and implementing compensation programmes, actually used the TJ rhetoric to muzzle the victims’ movements and obstruct prosecutions (p. 31). Like Dobransky, these authors criticise a dominant international TJ discourse that overlooks the local need to address not only the curtailment of civil and political rights, but also economic inequality, particularly in countries with high levels of social polarisation (pp. 20–1; 78).

This book thus formulates a number of important critiques of the TJ paradigm, and calls for a revision of its thematic, temporal and spatial scopes. Nevertheless, most of the chapters are written from a victim-focused perspective and assume the validity of victims’ claims without subjecting them to further scrutiny. Such an approach risks endorsing what Tzvetan Todorov calls ‘abuses of memory’. As Roberto Gargarella argues in the conclusion to the volume, victims, like other social groups, often try to dominate post-conflict processes in a one-sided manner, and their discourses must be treated with caution (p. 160). Moreover, the authors analyse the global/international TJ discourses and frameworks as if they had been created without any Latin American participation. This is however misleading. Latin American actors (including victims of state violence) did themselves contribute to global debates about post-dictatorial justice in the 1980s and the 1990s and succeeded in installing at an international level the idea that a combination of some truth-telling and amnesty was the best, and maybe the only possible, way for moving on from periods of political violence. These critiques aside, this book represents a valuable contribution to an emerging literature that abandons triumphalist discourses concerning TJ and calls for a critical examination of the ideological foundations, results and shortcomings of this paradigm.