The Criminalisation of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective

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The "third wave of democratisation", begun in the 1970s, was accompanied by novel processes designed to manage the legacies of dictatorships. An important literature has focused on "transitional justice" and "memory" in Europe and Latin America, two regions prominent in the creation of policies of addressing non-democratic pasts. By developing a socio-historical approach centred on the notion of criminalisation, this project represents a significant advance upon the previous scholarship, in three respects. First, it examines criminal justice in its interactions with the construction of the label of "crime" in three interconnected socio-professional spaces: historiography, victims' activism and heritage. Second, it proposes a historicised analysis of processes arising during the "third wave of democratisation" and considers the way they were influenced by forms of justice and memory that emerged in the aftermath of World War II. Third, the project examines the configuration of actors who generate criminalisation narratives, in order to assess empirically the transnational circulation of norms, repertoires of collective action and institutional measures adopted to deal with ousted regimes. This will allow us to reflect on the entanglements and mutual influences between Europe and Latin America, while at the same time situating these regions in the context of global dynamics. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of these phenomena, the project seeks also to foster cooperation between scholars and professional experts involved in reckoning with the past (jurists, curators, activists). A partnership has been forged with the NGO IC-MEMO, which gathers together more than twenty museums dedicated to the memory of victims of political crimes. Our collaboration with the BDIC will likewise allow us to exploit the unique collections of this institution and to disseminate more widely our research results via a virtual handbook for high-schools and universities.