Francesca Lessa's book is one of the most comprehensive studies to date of the politics of memory and transitional justice in the Southern Cone. Lessa spent years conducting extensive fieldwork in Argentina and Uruguay, which is reflected in the very compelling narratives about the advances and setbacks in the quest for truth and justice in these two countries over the course of three decades. This book will be of interest to those studying the strategies of human rights organisations to promote trials and other memory policies, and the dynamics of governmental responses to these pressures.
The main goal of the book is to understand the trajectory of human rights policies in Argentina and Uruguay, describing the transition from impunity to justice. The focus on these two cases is revealing. Whereas Argentina gradually evolved into a global protagonist of the human rights regime and is now an outlier in terms of the number of trials held and the convictions handed down by federal courts, Uruguay has always lagged behind regional and global trends. Interestingly, however, ‘their positions are now closer than ever before, given that both countries have overturned their amnesty laws, carried out prosecutions, and made important progress in truth and reparations’ (p. 4). As a result, Lessa's work is one that accounts for differences between the two cases but also one that traces converging trajectories.
Lessa offers two main theoretical contributions. The first is to explore the relationship between the way victims and societies remember their traumatic pasts, and the frames they use to characterise their struggle for redress. By taking the role of memory in processes of transitional justice seriously, Lessa is able to explore the discursive construction of the past by the relevant stakeholders as a key step prior to the adoption of specific human rights policies. As she explains, ‘this approach underscores the deeply selective and constructive nature of memory and draws attention to the continued attribution and reattribution of meaning to specific events in the past’ (p. 17). This is important because understanding how civil society organisations and the political class imagine the past and explain it in public can help account for the type of remedies they will prioritise in the present and the discursive tools at their disposal to justify their implementation. In this sense, instead of imputing policy goals to human rights NGOs, for example, Lessa explores where these goals come from and why some policy objectives enjoy more legitimacy than others.
The interplay between transitional justice initiatives and memory narratives is reflected in the structure of book. Each of the case studies is divided into two chapters. The first one explores the vicissitudes of attempts to prosecute those responsible for human rights violations, whereas the second one looks at how different episodes led to shifts in the memory narratives used to justify the need for judicial and non-judicial remedies. In other words, Lessa devotes two chapters to reconstructing the events that eventually put Argentina and Uruguay on similar trajectories, and two more to depicting how actors’ perceptions of the past and the contours of public discourse evolved over time.
The second contribution of the book is to characterise the different ‘moments’ or ‘critical junctures’ that push the quest for truth and justice forward. These ‘critical junctures do not necessarily generate new TJ mechanisms or memory narratives but rather account for why they evolve’ (p. 9). In the context of this book, critical junctures refer to episodes in a country's trajectory that may undermine or displace established memory narratives or approaches to transitional justice policy. Lessa identifies four types of critical junctures that are relevant to understanding the cases of Argentina and Uruguay: ‘these categories refer to different moments that trigger a phase of change and are of a political, opposition, evidentiary or international nature’ (p. 23, my emphasis). For example, the surfacing of new evidence about past atrocities can upset the balance of power by legitimising the claims of victim organisations, and thus undermine impunity.
This second aspect of Lessa's framework is most interesting because it brings together various strands of the literature on transitional justice in order to explain what triggers institutional and attitudinal changes in the direction of truth and justice. It is also balanced in its consideration of both domestic and international political dynamics. This is especially welcome since work in this field tends only to emphasise one side of the equation.
The focus on critical junctures is certainly provocative and may well inspire future work in this area. Although used loosely throughout the book, the notion of ‘critical juncture’ in political science refers to specific historical circumstances in which constraints on action are relaxed and the status quo becomes unstable and vulnerable to disruptions caused by contingent events or factors. But once critical junctures are ‘resolved’, they produce legacies that narrow down the scope for innovation and choice. It follows that the resolution of any of the critical junctures identified by Lessa should somehow condition the momentum in favour or against the strengthening of progressive responses to the legacies of state repression. As time goes by the ‘criticalness’ of future ‘moments’ is greatly reduced as the path forward becomes more and more overdetermined by past events and choices. In other words, subsequent evidentiary, international, political or opposition ‘moments’ are more likely to reproduce on-going power imbalances and policy trajectories, rather than disrupt them.
This begs two sets of questions. The first one is how we identify a critical juncture or moment when we see one. What makes the release of new evidence an ‘evidentiary moment’? Does it depend on the previous trajectory of the country? Greater conceptual clarity might be needed for other scholars to be able to export Lessa's framework. Second, how exactly do these ‘moments’ set cases along specific paths? In other words, what are the mechanisms of institutional change at play? Answering these questions will require additional efforts to theorise the processes by which each ‘critical juncture’ affects the resources and discursive frameworks of the actors involved, and how those effects may or may not be countervailed by subsequent shocks to the system. It might be productive to think systematically about the effects of sequencing on transitional justice outcomes. For example, what happens if evidentiary moments precede international ones, or if opposition backlashes occur before the onset of international campaigns against impunity?
This is an important addition to the field of memory studies and transitional justice. More than offering a rich and informative overview of Argentine and Uruguayan recent histories, the latter of which is remarkably understudied yet fascinating, Lessa's approach weaves together interdisciplinary insights to put forward a series of heuristic tools that allow us to explore the subject from interesting and novel angles.
