Irreconciliation as practice: resisting impunity and closure in Argentina

Abstract

AbstractIn Argentina, irreconciliation is created through everyday practices of vigilance against closure and collective struggles against impunity. In this essay, I show how over several decades since the fall of the dictatorial regime (1976‐83), human rights activists and laypeople have devised ways to keep the past alive while attending to injustices through embodied collective engagements with the country's history and its legacies. By examining large protests, the everyday experiences of impunity, and a filmic exploration of kinship bonds and their entanglement with civilian complicity in the repression, the essay illustrates the ways in which irreconciliation is materialized and enacted as a form of social reconstruction many years after state terrorism.