Accountability Shock

Guillermo Trejo is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Violence and Transitional Justice Lab at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He studies criminal and political violence, human rights, and transitional justice. Trejo is the co-author of Votes, Drugs, and Violence: The Political Logic of Criminal Wars in Mexico (2020, with Sandra Ley) and the author of Popular Movements in Autocracies: Religion, Repression, and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico (2012). Lucía Tiscornia is Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin and Faculty Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy. She studies police and criminal violence, criminal governance, transitional justice, and mixed-methods approaches to research. Juan Albarracín is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He studies criminal governance/politics, criminal and political violence, transitional justice, and electoral politics.

'Trejo, Tiscornia, and Albarracín's Accountability Shock will become an indispensable work not just for those interested in transitional justice, but also in security studies, criminology, and in peacebuilding. Impeccably researched, careful methodologically, the authors offer a novel way of understanding the impact of transitional justice. Avoiding the tendency to think that transitional justice measures are 'cure for all ills,' a common feature of the early literature in the field, they concentrate on the impact of truth and criminal trials (what they call an 'accountability shock') on future organized crime related deaths. Their ingenious explanation, which they manage to establish by means of mixed method methodologies, is that truth and justice take out of the armed forces 'authoritarian violence experts' whose continued presence in police or military forces invite militarized 'iron-fist' policies, protect criminals using their positions of state power, or defect to organized crime, all of which are associated with increases in deaths characteristic of postauthoritarian countries that fail to implement transitional justice policies.' Pablo de Greiff, (first) United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence, Senior Fellow and Director, Prevention Project, School of Law, New York University

• Introduction; Part I. Theory: 1. A Theory of Transitional Justice and Criminal Wars in New Democracies: Breaking State Impunity to Craft Peaceful Democracies; Part II. Quantitative Tests: 2. Preventing Large-Scale Criminal Violence in New Democracies: A Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of TJ on Homicide Rates; Part III. Case Studies: 3. Mexico and Peru: How TJ Prevents the Transformation of Counterinsurgency Wars into Drug Wars; 4. Brazil and Argentina: How TJ Prevents the Outbreak of Criminal Wars in Marginalized Urban Peripheries; 5. El Salvador and Guatemala: Why TJ Can Be an Effective Alternative to Militarized Iron-Fist Policies; Part IV. Comparative Historical Analysis: 6. It Was the State – Demise and Persistence of the Counterinsurgent State: Comparative Lessons on the Development of Peaceful Democracies by Means of Justice; Conclusion.