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History is a powerful tool in the hands of politicians, and can be a destructive weapon, as power over the past is the power to decide who is a hero and who is a traitor. Tradition, the remembrance of ancestors, experiences of previous generations are keys that unlock the doors to citizens’ minds, and allow certain ideas, visions and political programs to flourish. However, can history be a proper political weapon during democratization processes when the past is decisively divided from the present? Are the new order and society founded on the basis of some interpretation of the past, or, rather, are they founded only with reference to the imagined future of the nation? This book explores such questions through a detailed description of the use of remembrance policies during political transformations. It discusses how interpretations of the past served the realization of transitional objectives in countries as varied as Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, South Africa and Spain. The book is a unique journey through different parts of the world, different cultures and different political systems, investigating how history was remembered and forgotten by certain democratic leaders. Individual chapters discuss how governments’ remembrance policies were used to create a new citizen, to change a political culture, and to justify a vision of society promoted by new elites. They explain why some sore topics were avoided by politicians, and why sometimes there was no transitional justice or punishment of leaders of the authoritarian state. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore policies of remembrance, democratization, and the role of memory in contemporary societies.
History is a powerful tool in the hands of politicians, and can be a destructive weapon since power over the past is the power to decide who is a hero and who is a traitor. Tradition, the memory of ancestors, and the experience of previous generations are the keys that unlock the door to citizens’ minds, and allow certain ideas, visions and political programs to flourish. However, can history be a proper political weapon during democratisation processes when the past is clearly separated from the present? Are the new order and society founded on the basis of some interpretation of the past, or, rather, are they founded only with reference to the imagined future of the nation? This book explores such questions through a detailed description of the use of remembrance policies during political transformations. It discusses how interpretations of the past served the accomplishment of transitional objectives in countries as varied as Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, South Africa and Spain. The book is a unique journey through different parts of the world, different cultures and different political systems, investigating how history was remembered and forgotten by certain democratic leaders. Individual chapters discuss how governments’ remembrance policies were used to create a new citizen, to change a political culture, and to justify the vision of the society promoted by the new elites. They explain why some difficult topics were avoided by politicians, and why sometimes there was no transitional justice or punishment of the leaders of the authoritarian state. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore policies of remembrance, democratisation, and the role of memory in contemporary societies.
This book examines the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories of the dictatorship in the aftermath of the two first decades since the Uruguayan dictatorship of 1973-1984 in the broader context of public policies of denial and institutionalized impunity. Transitional justice studies have tended to focus on countries like Argentina or Chile in the Southern Cone of Latin America. However, not much research has been conducted on the "silent" cases of transitions as a result of negotiated pacts. The literature on memory trauma and impunity has much to offer to studies of transition and post-authoritarianism. This book situates the human and cultural experience of state terrorism from the perspective of the experiences of Uruguayan families, through an in-depth ethnographic, cultural, psycho-social, and political interdisciplinary study. It will be a valuable resource to students, scholars, and practitioners who are interested in substantive questions of memory, democratization, and transitional justice, set in Uruguay's scenario, as well as to human rights policy-makers, advocates and educators and social and political scientists, cultural analysts, politicians, social psychologists, psychotherapists, and activists. It will also appeal to the general public who are interested in the problem of how to transmit the stories and meaning of traumatic experiences as a result of gross human rights violations, the cultural and generational effects of state terror, and the politics of impunity. This book is essential for collections in Latin American studies, political science, and sociology.
The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, creating collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that have emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts, such as Germany, Romania, Russia and others.
History is a powerful tool in hands of politicians, and can be a destructive weapon, as power over the past is the power to decide who is a hero and who is a traitor. Tradition, the remembrance of ancestors, experiences of previous generations are keys that unlock the doors to citizens’ minds, and allow certain ideas, visions and political programs to flourish. However, can history be a proper political weapon during democratization processes when the past is decisively divided from the present? Are the new order and society founded on the basis of some interpretation of the past, or, rather, are they founded only with reference to the imagined future of the nation? This book explores such questions through a detailed description of the use of remembrance policies during political transformations. It discusses how interpretations of the past served the realization of transitional objectives in countries as varied as Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, South Africa and Spain. The book is a unique journey through different parts of the world, different cultures and different political systems, investigating how history was remembered and forgotten by certain democratic leaders. Individual chapters discuss how governments’ remembrance policies were used to create a new citizen, to change a political culture, and to justify a vision of society promoted by new elites. They explain why some sore topics were avoided by politicians, and why sometimes there was no transitional justice or punishment of leaders of the authoritarian state. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore policies of remembrance, democratization, and the role of memory in contemporary societies. --
This book addresses memory politics and their evolution as an academic discipline, including memory studies. It explores national and international debates about conflicting interpretations of the recent past, including WWII remembering, the annexation of Ukraine, the reformed history teaching in Putin’s Russia, Historikerstreit and the holocaust in Germany, and the legacy and role of nuclear weapons in international relations in the USA in the context of the so called New Cold War.
In recent years the agenda of how to ‘deal with the past’ has become a central dimension of the quality of contemporary democracies. Many years after the process of authoritarian breakdown, consolidated democracies revisit the past either symbolically or to punish the elites associated with the previous authoritarian regimes. New factors, like international environment, conditionality, party cleavages, memory cycles and commemorations or politics of apologies, do sometimes bring the past back into the political arena. This book addresses such themes by dealing with two dimensions of authoritarian legacies in Southern European democracies: repressive institutions and human rights abuses. The thrust of this book is that we should view transitional justice as part of a broader ‘politics of the past’: an ongoing process in which elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the past in terms of what they hope to achieve in the present. This book was published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.
How do individual and collective memories of the repressive Pinochet regime affect the fabric of Chilean politics and society today? How have the politics of memory in Chile¿including the official policies and symbolic representations that address the painful violations of the past¿evolved over the years since Pinochet¿s demise? The authors of this important new book provide an authoritative assessment of the politics of memory in Chile and consider, as well, the comparative lessons of the Chilean case.
History is a powerful tool in the hands of politicians, and can be a destructive weapon since power over the past is the power to decide who is a hero and who is a traitor. Tradition, the memory of ancestors, and the experience of previous generations are the keys that unlock the door to citizens minds, and allow certain ideas, visions and political programs to flourish. However, can history be a proper political weapon during democratisation processes when the past is clearly separated from the present? Are the new order and society founded on the basis of some interpretation of the past, or, rather, are they founded only with reference to the imagined future of the nation? This book explores such questions through a detailed description of the use of remembrance policies during political transformations. It discusses how interpretations of the past served the accomplishment of transitional objectives in countries as varied as Chile, Estonia, Georgia, Poland, South Africa and Spain. The book is a unique journey through different parts of the world, different cultures and different political systems, investigating how history was remembered and forgotten by certain democratic leaders. Individual chapters discuss how governments remembrance policies were used to create a new citizen, to change a political culture, and to justify the vision of the society promoted by the new elites. They explain why some difficult topics were avoided by politicians, and why sometimes there was no transitional justice or punishment of the leaders of the authoritarian state. The book will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore policies of remembrance, democratisation, and the role of memory in contemporary societies.
This book is the first concentrated effort to explore the most recent chapter of East Central European past from the perspective of intellectual history. Post-socialism can be understood both as a period of scarcity and preponderance of ideas, the dramatic eclipsing of the dissident legacy?as well as the older political traditions?and the rise of technocratic and post-political governance. This book, grounded in empirical research sensitive to local contexts, proposes instead a history of adaptations, entanglements, and unintended consequences. In order to enable and invite comparison, the volume is structured around major domains of political thought, some of them generic (liberalism, conservatism, the Left), others (populism and politics of history) deemed typical for post-socialism. However, as shown by the authors, the generic often turns out to be heavily dependent on its immediate setting, and the typical resonates with processes that are anything but vernacular.