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The foundation of a stable democracy in Spain was built on a settled account: an agreement that both sides were equally guilty of violence, a consensus to avoid contention, and a pact of oblivion as the pathway to peace and democracy. That foundation is beginning to crack as perpetrators’ confessions upset the silence and exhumations of mass graves unbury new truths. It has become possible, even if not completely socially acceptable, to speak openly about the past, to disclose the testimonies of the victims, and to ask for truth and justice. Contentious coexistence that put political participation, contestation, and expression in practice has begun to emerge. This book analyzes how this recent transformation has occurred. It recognizes that political processes are not always linear and inexorable. Thus, it remains to be seen how far contentious coexistence will go in Spain.
This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the multiple legacies of Francoist violence in contemporary Spain, with a special focus on the exhumations of mass graves from the Civil War and post-war era. The various contributions frame their study within a broader reflection on the nature, function and legacies of state-sanctioned violence in its many forms. Offering perspectives from fields as varied as history, political science, literary and cultural studies, forensic and cultural anthropology, international human rights law, sociology, and art, this volume explores the multifaceted nature of a society’s reckoning with past violence. It speaks not only to those interested in contemporary Spain and Western Europe, but also to those studying issues of transitional and post-transitional justice in other national and regional contexts.
This volume examines the ways in which the violent legacies of the twentieth century continue to affect the concept of the nation. Through a study of three societies’ commemoration of notorious episodes of 1930s state violence, the author considers the manner in which attention to the state violence authoritarianism, and exclusions of the last century have resulted in challenges to dominant conceptions of the nation. Based on extensive ethnographic research in El Salvador, Spain, and the Dominican Republic, Remembering Violence focuses on new public sites of memory, such as museum exhibitions, monuments, and commemorations – powerful loci for representing ideas about the nation – and explores the responses of various actors – civil society, government, and diasporic citizens – as well as those of UN and other international agencies invested in new nation-building goals. With attention to the ways in which memory practices explain ongoing national exclusions and contemporary efforts to contest them, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in public memory and commemoration.
Why was Franco exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen in late 2019? How is it that he was there in the first place? Why did Catalonia erupt suddenly in October 2017? Why don’t you hear so much about the Basque Country anymore? How did Podemos gather momentum so quickly in 2014-15, and why did half of that support vanish five years later? Isn’t it counterintuitive that a Catholic-majority country also has the most LGBT-friendly society in the world? Understanding the most significant events in recent Spanish politics requires spelling out the unspoken but enduring foundations of the country’s deepest fears and weaknesses, its Achilles' heels. In Greek mythology, an Achilles' heel is a vulnerability that can lead to downfall despite the apparent general strength of the full body. Casla uses this term to define the underlying factors that, while by no means unique, are characteristic of a particular society, delimit what is possible and shape the political debate. They are the primary political frailties without which a country’s politics cannot be properly comprehended.
This book presents a comprehensive analysis of the Italian experience of transitional justice examining how the crimes of Fascism and World War II have been dealt with from a comparative perspective. Applying an interdisciplinary and comparative methodology, the book offers a detailed reconstruction of the prosecution of the crimes of Fascism and the Italian Social Republic as well as crimes committed by Nazi soldiers against Italian civilians and those of the Italian army against foreign populations. It also explores the legal qualification and prosecution of the actions of the Resistance. Particular focus is given to the Togliatti Amnesty, the major turning point, through comparisons to the wider European post-WWII transitional scenario and other relevant transitional amnesties, allowing consideration of the intense debate on the legitimacy of amnesties under international law. The book evaluates the Italian experience and provides an ideal framework to assess the complexity of the interdependencies between time, historical memory and the use of criminal law. In a historical moment marked by the resurgence of racism, neo-fascism, falsifications of the past, as well as the desire to amend the faults of the past, the Italian unfinished experience of dealing with the Fascist era can help move the discussion forward. The book will be essential reading for students, researchers and academics in International Criminal Law, Transitional Justice, History, Memory Studies and Political Science.
In 2014 a new progressive party, Podemos, emerged on the Spanish political scene. Within just over two years it had become the country’s third-biggest party, winning a slew of seats in parliament and regularly making headline news. While some see Podemos as the saviour of Spanish democracy, others have accused it of corrosive populism. But what few have noticed is that behind its distinctive rhetoric lies a thinker closely associated with Germany’s Third Reich: Carl Schmitt. Why has an ostensibly progressive and avowedly anti-fascist political party taken up Schmitt’s ideas? The puzzle only deepens when we learn of Schmitt’s links with Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. In The Dark Side of Podemos?, Booth and Baert explain why Schmittian theory resonated with Podemos’ founders. In doing so, the authors position Podemos and the ideas that guide it within the context of recent Spanish history and ongoing politics of memory, revealing a story about how personal and political narratives have combined to produce a formidable political force. This enlightening monograph will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such as Politics, Political Theory and Sociology. It will also be relevant to those curious about contemporary Spanish politics, the nature of populism, the future of the European left, or Carl Schmitt and his links with Spain.
Abena Ampofoa Asare identifies the documents, testimonies, and petitions gathered by Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission as a portal to an unprecedented public archive of Ghanaian political history as told by the self-described survivors of human rights abuse.
Spain has never worked as a democracy. Throughout the country's history only one system of government has ever enjoyed any real success: dictatorship and the use of violence. Violence, in fact, is what Spain is made of, lying at the heart of its culture and identity, far more so than any other western European nation. For well over a thousand years, the country has only ever been forged and then been held together through the use of aggression - brutal, merciless terror and warfare directed against its own people. Without it the country breaks apart and Spain ceases to exist - a fact that recent events in Barcelona confirm. Authoritarianism is the Spanish default setting. Yet Spain has produced many of the most important artists and thinkers in the Western world, from Cervantes, author of the first modern novel, to Goya, the first modern painter. Much of Western artistic expression, in fact, from the Picaresque to Cubism, would be unthinkable without the Spanish contribution. This unique national genius, however, does not exist despite Spain's violent backdrop; it is, in fact, born out of it. Indeed Spain's genius and violent nature go hand in hand, locked together in a macabre, elaborate dance. This is the country's tragedy. La Violencia unveils this truth for the first time, exposing the bloody heart of Spain - from its origins in the ancient past to the Civil War and the current crisis in Catalonia. La Violencia will be in the tradition of those books which come to define our understanding of a country.
Scholars have argued that the state has the power not only to decide who lives and who dies, but also has multiple "modalities of power deployment over the production and management of the dead," known as necropower. However, the emergence of a forensics-based human rights social movement raises larger questions about how activists in post-conflict states are using forensic science to seize this nexus of state necropower. My research thus focuses on understanding: How are human rights activists using forensics and DNA testing to reframe histories of violence? How are these human rights activists using various mechanisms (globalized conceptions of human rights, transnational activist networks, international law, pedagogy, performance, embodiment)to further their goals of restoring identity, memory, and justice within a globalized context? This study seeks to explore these questions through a case study of the silencing of the past in Spain. My analysis draws on a mixed methods approach, including a 15-month participant observation study, over 234 in-depth interviews, and a historical analysis of secondary literature. Chapter 2, Human Rights Forensics, A Global Movement Born in Death, focuses on the work of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who initiated and globalized this movement in response to the violent military regime that terrorized Argentina from 1976-1983 and left at least 30,000 people missing. It draws from a variety of data sources, including historical secondary literature, legal cases, and interviews with the leaders of the EAAF and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, as well as two months of observational data collected in Argentina in 2015. This chapter builds the groundwork of how forensics-based human rights transnational movement began, flourished, and spread. It shows that the Argentinean example may be one of the only fully successful cases of activists seizing control of a dominant narrative of state terror. Furthermore, chapter 2 problematizes the unforeseen challenges that forensics-based human rights can face when it reifies genetic kinship ties over other types of familial connections. I further analyze the impact of the EAAF and the Grandmothers' globalization of this movement in an in-depth case study of Spain's most prolific human rights forensic organization--the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH). My analyses draw on a 15-month participant observation of the ARMH, over 230 in-depth interviews, and a discourse analysis of visitors' guest books from ARMH exhumations. I approach the case study through an in-depth analysis of three key dimensions: Performance, Pedagogy, and International Connections. I argue that these three dimensions illustrate the complex, overlapping, and sometimes-contradictory tactics that ARMH activists use in their reframing of Spain's violent past. Chapters 4-6 thus represent the core of the research, with each chapter directly corresponding to each of these dimensions. In sum, I find that, by basing their claims in science, human rights activists transform perceptions of them from prejudiced activists with political goals into objective experts. Using science, international protocols, and tropes of modernity; activists depoliticize their version of state terror. I illustrate how, by using this 'depoliticized approach,' human rights activists successfully seize necropower from the state, meaningfully change how people understand and remember past violence, mold transitional justice efforts, restitute the identities of missing persons, and facilitate important death rituals for victims' families. I further find, that in the Spanish case, due to an old and long history of institutionalized silence and fear, activists have to work harder to break the silence of the past. To do this, they use performative actions, such as teaching forensics classes to local Spaniards who are visiting mass grave exhumations. These performances promote the ARMH's 'de-politicized' science driven narrative of Spain's violent history, as well as introduce moral claims about the rights of the victims' families and the need for transitional justice. Moreover, I find that the ARMH, as members of a transnational social movement, is influenced by the growth of the larger movement, whose sovereignty and legitimacy has risen--in many cases--above that of the nation-state.
Historians have only recently established the scale of the violence carried out by the supporters of General Franco during and after the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. An estimated 88,000 unidentified victims of Francoist violence remain to be exhumed from mass graves and given a dignified burial, and for decades, the history of these victims has also been buried. This volume brings together a range of Spanish and British specialists who offer an original and challenging overview of this violence. Contributors not only examine the mass killings and incarcerations, but also carefully consider how the repression carried out in the government zone during the Civil War - long misrepresented in Francoist accounts - seeped into everyday life. A final section explores ways of facing Spain’s recent violent past.