Transitional Justice Mechanisms and Memory Narratives

Abstract

Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay: Against Impunity. By Francesca Lessa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 336 pp., hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-137-26938-6). Francesca Lessa's book is a welcome addition to a burgeoning literature in international relations focusing on memory and its politics. For a long time, work within the field of Memory Studies has primarily remained the purview of the humanities, while legal mechanisms of transitional justice post-conflict have been addressed by the social sciences. The main contribution of Lessa's book is in bringing these literatures together to focus on how transitional justice and memory narratives are interrelated. The book utilizes an interdisciplinary framework of “critical junctures,” these being key discursive turning points at which one can identify changes in both transitional justice mechanisms and memory narratives. While the overarching argument—that there is a mutually shaping constitutive relationship between memory and transitional justice—at first seems obvious, the way this relationship is traced is where this book truly shines. Relying on several years' worth of field work and interviews in Argentina and Uruguay, as well as thorough analysis of documents and their contexts, Lessa is able to delve deep into the nuances of these two cases. The book will be useful to scholars who are familiar with transitional justice issues in Argentina and Uruguay, and accessible to scholars who are unfamiliar with these cases. Lessa identifies four types of critical junctures that she pinpoints in both the Argentinian and Uruguayan cases, including the political moment (changes …