ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows how prosecuting crimes against humanity can play a key role in redressing victims and attempting to overcome – at least partially – the damage caused by state violence. It also shows why and how domestic human rights trials can become a centrepiece of social and personal reparation. The book engages with the relation between domestic prosecutions and a new conceptualisation of reparation: reparation as change. It draws on theoretical and legal approaches regarding the meaning of reparation as well as the role of law as an instrument of power and communication which has the potential of reconfiguring social relationships. The book focuses on the analysis of trials for crimes against humanity in Argentina and their concrete reparative changes on victims' lives. Victimhood is socially and legally constructed, within social and political contexts that simultaneously frame and influence that definition.