ABSTRACT
The 1986 publication of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, a major fourvolume work focused on Latin America and Eastern Europe, helped to define the terms of a still-new field, that of studying how (and under what constraints) democratic transitions take shape after a period of repressive rule.1 While the question of “settling past accounts,” as the authors call it, is not the central focus of the study, they note a difficult tension between the desire to bury the past, in order to avoid provoking the ire of powerful wrongdoers, and the ethical and political demand to confront the crimes of the prior regime. The authors highlight this dilemma as one of “immense difficulty” for which they have no satisfactory resolution, and posit in a footnote that an essential difference between this and other transitional problems is that this dilemma is one that “simply cannot be avoided and one that the leaders must attempt to resolve.”2
