Dealing with Wars and Dictatorships: Legal Concepts and Categories in Action [Hardcover]

Democratic transitions in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and South Africa, often studied under the conceptual rubric of transitional justice, have involved the formation of public policies toward the past that are multifaceted and often ambitious. Recent scholarship rarely questions the concepts and categories transposed from one country to another. This is true both in the language of political life and in the social sciences examining past-oriented public policy, especially policy toward ethnic cleansing and the line between the language of political practice, legal analysis, and scholarly discourse has been quite porous. This book examines how these phenomena have been described and understood by focusing recent processes, such as the advent of international criminal justice, in relation to previous postwar and recent purges. By crossing disciplinary approaches and periods, the authors pay attention to three main aspects: the legal or political concepts used (and/or the ones mobilized in the academic work); the circulation of categories, know-how, and arguments; the different levels that can shed light on transitions.

General Introduction.- ?puration: History of a Word.- Humanity Seized by International Criminal Justice.- Dealing with Collaboration in Belgium after the Second World War: From Activism to Collaboration and Incivism.- ?Transitional Justice as Universal Narrative.- The Invention of Transitional Justice in the 1990s.- Transitional Justice and National Mastering of the Past: Criminal Justice and Liberalization Processes in West Germany after 1945.- Poor Little Belgium? Belgian Trials of German War Criminals, 1944-1951.- From Revolution to Restoration. Transnational Implications of the Greek Purge of Wartime Collaborators.- The Defense in the Dock: Professional Purges of French Lawyers after the Second World War.- Law and the Soviet Purge: Domestic Renewal and International Convergences.- Circulation of Models of ?purationl£\