Leigh A. Payne - Böcker

Bruno Tesch was tried and executed for his company's Zyklon B gas used in Nazi Germany's extermination camps. This book examines this trial and the more than 300 other economic actors who faced prosecution for the Holocaust's crimes against humanity. It further tracks and analyses similar transitional justice mechanisms for holding economic actors accountable for human rights violations in dictatorships and armed conflict: international, foreign, and domestic trials and truth commissions from the 1970s to the present in every region of the world. This book probes what these accountability efforts are, why they take place, and when, where, and how they unfold. Analysis of the authors' original database leads them to conclude that 'corporate accountability from below' is underway, particularly in Latin America. A kind of Archimedes' lever places the right tools in weak local actors' hands to lift weighty international human rights claims, overcoming the near absence of international pressure and the powerful veto power of business.

Who is the collaborator, or in whose eyes? What is the motivation to collaborate: for material gain, for ideology, for duty? When is collaboration betraying a hated enemy, and when is it something else: personal revenge or an instrumental, rational, or even coerced response to a situation, for example? Why do collaborators meet such harsh punishment and stigma when they are revealed as such? Can they ever atone or find redemption? Beyond the perception of the stakeholders involved, how harmful is collaboration? Does it exacerbate or abate violence? Is it always evil or can it sometimes be seen as mitigating wrongs? The chapters in Collaboration in Authoritarian and Armed Conflict Settings explore these thorny questions through a set of case studies, disciplinary approaches, and temporal and regional contexts. They show the range of the types of collaboration; the ubiquity of collaboration across time, countries, political systems, and political and cultural conflicts.

Latin America sits at the centre of the third wave of democratisation beginning in the early 1980s. It has advanced farther than any other region of the world in its accountability processes for past human rights violations perpetrated during authoritarian regimes and armed conflicts. Despite these human rights achievements, Latin America is known as the most violent global region. In the last two decades since the transitions, serious human rights violations, especially disappearances, have increased exponentially in several countries in the region. This volume seeks to understand these post-transition disappearances. It does so by examining four different countries and the dynamics that play out there. It considers a variety of voices and points of view: those expressing the experiences from the perspectives of victims and relatives; those of activists, advocates, and public officials seeking truth and justice; and those from scholars attempting to draw out the specificities in each case and the patterns across cases. The underlying objective behind the project to gain knowledge and to draw on deep commitment to change within the region is to overcome this tragedy. After reading this volume, readers will not only have an overview of the practice of disappearances in the region, but will also be able to gauge how, despite the differences, the social and political logics that make disappearances possible are similar. The disappearances of the past and those of present are not the same, and it would be a mistake to consider them that way, but the social practices that make them possible are similar. These practices are what we call the logics of disappearance.

The rights of victims to truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition when businesses are involved in past and present abuses are seldom guaranteed. A legacy of impunity has prevailed globally in which economic actors have incurred few legal or financial (indemnity) costs for violating behaviour. Examining cases in Nazi Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Perú, the Philippines and South Africa, this edited volume traces business accountability efforts. It identifies the tools applicable to different country contexts that have facilitated corporate accountability for human rights violations, while also flagging the barriers that persist. This volume presents the past and the present of accountability for corporations complicit in gross human rights violations, and also considers what the future may hold.

From President Bolsonaro's openly racist, misogynist, and homophobic rhetoric in Brazil, to the politicisation of gender ideology leading to the rejection of a peace deal in Colombia and beyond, Latin America is home to right-against-rights movements that have grown in numbers, strength, and influence in recent years. New anti-rights groups are intent on blocking, rolling back, and reversing social movements' legislative advances by obstructing justice and accountability processes and influencing politicians across the region. The Right against Rights in Latin America contains chapters that empirically explore the breadth, depth, and diversity of a new wave of anti-rights movements in Latin America. It details why they are fundamentally different from previous movements in the region, and — perhaps more importantly — why it is of vital importance that we study, analyse, and understand them in a global context.

An Argentine naval officer remorsefully admits that he killed thirty people during Argentina’s Dirty War. A member of General Augusto Pinochet’s intelligence service reveals on a television show that he took sadistic pleasure in the sexual torture of women in clandestine prisons. A Brazilian military officer draws on his own experiences to write a novel describing the military’s involvement in a massacre during the 1970s. The head of a police death squad refuses to become the scapegoat for apartheid-era violence in South Africa; he begins to name names and provide details of past atrocities to the Truth Commission. Focusing on these and other confessions to acts of authoritarian state violence, Leigh A. Payne asks what happens when perpetrators publicly admit or discuss their actions. While mechanisms such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are touted as means of settling accounts with the past, Payne contends that public confessions do not settle the past. They are unsettling by nature. Rather than reconcile past violence, they catalyze contentious debate. She argues that this debate-and the public confessions that trigger it-are healthy for democratic processes of political participation, freedom of expression, and the contestation of political ideas.Payne draws on interviews, unedited television film, newspaper archives, and books written by perpetrators to analyze confessions of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. Each of these four countries addressed its past through a different institutional form-from blanket amnesty, to conditional amnesty based on confessions, to judicial trials. Payne considers perpetrators’ confessions as performance, examining what they say and what they communicate nonverbally; the timing, setting, and reception of their confessions; and the different ways that they portray their pasts, whether in terms of remorse, heroism, denial, or sadism, or through lies or betrayal.

Accounting for Violence offers bold new perspectives on the politics of memory in Latin America. Scholars from across the humanities and social sciences provide in-depth analyses of the political economy of memory in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, countries that emerged from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors take up issues of authenticity and commodification, as well as the “never again” imperative implicit in memory goods and memorial sites. They describe how bookstores, cinemas, theaters, the music industry, and television shows (and their commercial sponsors) trade in testimonial and fictional accounts of the authoritarian past; how tourist itineraries have come to include trauma sites and memorial museums; and how memory studies has emerged as a distinct academic field profiting from its own journals, conferences, book series, and courses. The memory market, described in terms of goods, sites, producers, marketers, consumers, and patrons, presents a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, commodifying memory potentially cheapens it. On the other hand, too little public exposure may limit awareness of past human-rights atrocities; such awareness may help to prevent their recurring.Contributors. Rebecca J. Atencio, Ksenija Bilbija, Jo-Marie Burt, Laurie Beth Clark, Cath Collins, Susana Draper, Nancy Gates-Madsen, Susana Kaiser, Cynthia E. Milton, Alice A. Nelson, Carmen Oquendo Villar, Leigh A. Payne, JosÉ RamÓn RuisÁnchez Serra, Maria Eugenia Ulfe

This edited volume brings together well-established and emerging scholars of transitional justice to discuss the persistence of amnesty in the age of human rights accountability. The volume attempts to reframe debates, moving beyond the limited approaches of 'truth versus justice' or 'stability versus accountability' in which many of these issues have been cast in the existing scholarship. The theoretical and empirical contributions in this book offer new ways of understanding and tackling the enduring persistence of amnesty in the age of accountability. In addition to cross-national studies, the volume encompasses eleven country cases of amnesty for past human rights violations: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda, South Africa, Spain, Uganda and Uruguay. The volume goes beyond merely describing these case studies, but also considers what we learn from them in terms of overcoming impunity and promoting accountability to contribute to improvements in human rights and democracy.

This edited volume brings together well-established and emerging scholars of transitional justice to discuss the persistence of amnesty in the age of human rights accountability. The volume attempts to reframe debates, moving beyond the limited approaches of 'truth versus justice' or 'stability versus accountability' in which many of these issues have been cast in the existing scholarship. The theoretical and empirical contributions in this book offer new ways of understanding and tackling the enduring persistence of amnesty in the age of accountability. In addition to cross-national studies, the volume encompasses eleven country cases of amnesty for past human rights violations: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda, South Africa, Spain, Uganda and Uruguay. The volume goes beyond merely describing these case studies, but also considers what we learn from them in terms of overcoming impunity and promoting accountability to contribute to improvements in human rights and democracy.

Bruno Tesch was tried and executed for his company's Zyklon B gas used in Nazi Germany's extermination camps. This book examines this trial and the more than 300 other economic actors who faced prosecution for the Holocaust's crimes against humanity. It further tracks and analyses similar transitional justice mechanisms for holding economic actors accountable for human rights violations in dictatorships and armed conflict: international, foreign, and domestic trials and truth commissions from the 1970s to the present in every region of the world. This book probes what these accountability efforts are, why they take place, and when, where, and how they unfold. Analysis of the authors' original database leads them to conclude that 'corporate accountability from below' is underway, particularly in Latin America. A kind of Archimedes' lever places the right tools in weak local actors' hands to lift weighty international human rights claims, overcoming the near absence of international pressure and the powerful veto power of business.