This chapter summarizes the book’s main findings and discusses five major contributions to the study of transitional justice (TJ) as a powerful force to prevent criminal wars in new democracies: (1) the importance of conceptualizing organized crime as a hybrid field of state–criminal networks, where state specialists in violence play a central role; (2) TJ’s power to influence peace and war in the criminal underworld by exposing and sanctioning state specialists in violence; (3) the crucial role of state accountability for the development of peaceful democracies; (4) the importance of dismantling violent counterinsurgent states by means of justice before electoral competition becomes routinized in new democracies; and (5) the dangers that the survival of the counterinsurgent state and its militarized public security practices, and the persistence of criminal wars, pose for the integrity of democratic regimes. The book ends with a reflection on Third Wave democracies. In the mid 1980s, scholars of democratization warned elites and societies to renounce (or at least postpone) demands for accountability for past atrocities to avoid a military backlash that would compromise democratic stability. Accountability Shock draws a different conclusion: Failure to address a repressive past paves the way for a future of democratic instability, large-scale violence, and gross human rights violations.

This chapter develops the theoretical explanation of why transitional justice processes and the reckoning of a repressive history can prevent the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence in new democracies. It first discusses a new conception of organized crime where complicit state specialists in violence are central players in illicit economies and in the production of large-scale criminal violence. It suggests that these engagements often emerge in autocracies, where autocrats allow military and police forces to capitalize on their repressive power to kill political dissidents and on their de facto impunity to control the criminal underworld. If left unaccountable, authoritarian specialists in violence can become leading actors in the production of criminal violence in democracy by defecting to fight turf wars or defending organized criminal groups from positions of power or spearheading Wars on Drugs, Gangs, or Crime. It claims that when new democratic elites expose and sanction authoritarian specialists in violence through robust truth commissions and criminal trials, they unleash a powerful accountability shock that breaks state impunity and deters security forces from using state coercive power to control illicit economies through lethal force. Failure to reckon with a repressive history, and the survival of the violent state, sets new democracies on trajectories of power abuse and criminal wars.

This chapter presents the statistical analysis of the main theoretical propositions across countries. It first discusses the sample of seventy-six Third Wave democracies (1974–2005), why the homicide rate is used as the metric of criminal violence, and the different indices created to capture various dimensions of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws. It then explains why we test for the immediate and cumulative impacts of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws and their joint effects. Using the global sample and a subsample of seventeen Latin American countries, the results indicate that truth commissions have a strong deterrent effect on the murder rate and criminal prosecution only has an impact when combined with truth commissions. The joint effect of truth and justice represents the accountability shock’s violence-reducing effect. The shock is more powerful in the Latin American subsample. Additional models reveal two crucial points: (1) to have an effect, the accountability shock needs to be robust; and (2) the effect of the accountability shock (absent other measures) expires after about ten years. The positive association between amnesty laws and higher homicide rates reinforces the conclusion that persistent state impunity promotes violence, underscoring the importance of accountability for past atrocities as necessary for future violence reduction.

This chapter uses the Latin American case studies presented in the previous chapters to identify general cross-national patterns and historically ground the theory and statistical findings about transitional justice’s (TJ) violence prevention effect. It first shows that during the Cold War all six countries developed counterinsurgent states with striking similarities under autocracy. In all cases, authoritarian specialists in violence capitalized on their power to kill with impunity to dominate the criminal underworld. It then discusses how TJ was a fork in the road. The adoption of robust TJ processes, combining strong truth commissions and criminal prosecution of perpetrators, allowed Argentina, Peru, and Guatemala to dismantle counterinsurgent states, preventing criminal wars and reducing violence and gross human rights violations. But the persistence of state impunity and the survival of the counterinsurgent state led to Wars on Drugs or Gangs or Crime and to turf wars that resulted in mass atrocities in Mexico, El Salvador, and Brazil. The final section discusses how in cases with robust TJ the institutionalization of accountability policies can contribute to the development of self-sustaining peaceful democracies, and how a reformulated TJ toolkit can serve democracies with persistent impunity, trapped in deadly criminal wars, enter into paths of peaceful reconstruction.

This chapter analyzes two countries where criminal economies have thrived in marginalized urban communities, yet only Brazil experiences localized criminal wars while Argentina faces limited violence. The chapter explains how the Brazilian military dictatorship developed a counterinsurgent state with an extensive intelligence and repressive apparatus that allowed its specialists in violence’s involvement in illicit economies. The first democratic government failed to hold authoritarian specialists in violence accountable, and validated a military-era amnesty law, enabling the survival of the counterinsurgent state. Authoritarian security forces adapted counterinsurgency practices to launch wars on crime, sold protection to gangs, or controlled illicit markets, turning Brazil into one of the world’s most violent democracies. The chapter then discusses the development of Argentina’s counterinsurgent state. It analyzes the role of the security apparatus in developing a clandestine carceral system to perpetrate gross human right violations and the participation of authoritarian specialists in violence in illicit markets in dictatorship. After transitioning to democracy, Argentina’s first administration initiated a robust truth commission and the historic trial of the military juntas, unlocking Latin America’s most powerful accountability shock. Multiple truth and justice “boosters” contributed to dismantle the counterinsurgent state, to deflate criminal markets, and to put the country on a path of relative peaceful development.

This chapter explores how, after signing United Nations-sponsored peace agreements to end protracted civil wars, post-authoritarian El Salvador and Guatemala followed different trajectories of peace and violence. It first traces the development of El Salvador’s counterinsurgent state under military rule and its transformation during the civil war. It analyzes how the civil war military establishment, special military forces, and clandestine death squads capitalized on their repressive power to fight guerrillas through brutal force and on de facto impunity to engage in multiple illicit economies. The peace agreement led to an influential truth commission, but an amnesty neutralized it, preserving impunity and the counterinsurgent state. Right- and left-wing governments used counterinsurgent forces to launch Wars on Gangs, and state-gang and inter-gang warfare turned El Salvador into the world’s murder capital. It then discusses the rise of the counterinsurgent state during Guatemala’s civil war and the institutional transformations that empowered the military, elite and paramilitary forces, and death squads to lead a genocidal campaign against the Mayan people while becoming intimately involved in criminal markets. Two truth commissions exposed war atrocities and subsequently a reformed Guatemalan law enforcement, assisted by the International Commission against Impunity, dismantled criminal structures linked to the military establishment, deflating criminal markets, and driving down the murder rate.

This chapter introduces the questions and puzzles that drive the book’s research, outlines the theoretical argument, explains the research design and multimethod approach, and summarizes the main empirical findings. By examining the contrasting experiences of post-authoritarian development in Mexico and Peru, it establishes two paths that Third Wave democracies followed: criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence or relatively peaceful development. Existing explanations focusing on poverty and inequality, state capacity, and history of political instability, predict that Peru would experience significant violence in democracy while Mexico would follow a path of relatively peaceful development. Yet by adopting an ambitious transitional justice (TJ) process to reckon with its repressive history, Peru prevented the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence and criminal wars while Mexico did not. The chapter presents the building blocks of the theoretical explanation. It discusses why we need a new definition of organized crime and large-scale criminal violence that places violent states and authoritarian specialists in violence at the center. It then explains why developing peaceful democracies requires dismantling the violent state and why TJ mechanisms are uniquely suited to this task. It concludes with a discussion of the multimethod strategy for theory-testing and the findings and their implications for the study of peaceful democracies.

Between 2015 and 2023 the Law and Justice government significantly altered the composition of the Polish Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the National Council of Judiciary. It has also expanded the power of the executive branch in relation to the courts. This process – which the majority of scholars and legal practitioners saw as a period of deterioration of the rule of law – also had a transitional justice dimension. In this chapter, I claim that the decline of Polish liberal constitutionalism was possible because the Law and Justice party managed to create an alternative constitutional vision – a counter-constitution, to borrow the term from Kim Lane Scheppele – the cornerstone of which was the belief in ‘legal impossibilism’. ‘Legal impossiblism’ was often understood to refer to strict constitutional constraints supposedly preventing the parliamentary majority from introducing crucial reforms. The analysis of the Polish constitutional framework demonstrates that, in the transitional justice domain, ‘legal impossibilism’ perceived this way is a myth. However, I argue that the previous government perceived ‘legal impossibilism’ differently: as restraints upon a radical shake-up in political, social and economic hierarchies. For the Law and Justice party, without such a change the democratic transformation remained incomplete.

This chapter explores why, despite being central players in transnational drug markets, Mexico and Peru’s post-authoritarian trajectories of peace and violence differ. It first examines how the Mexican military developed a powerful counterinsurgent state to fight leftist insurgents and dissidents under one-party rule. Once it succeeded in suppressing rebels through a Dirty War, authoritarian specialists in violence helped transform local traffickers into transnational drug cartels. After democratization, the first administration failed to adopt a transitional justice (TJ) process and subsequent governments deployed the surviving counterinsurgent state to fight a War on Drugs, leading to the proliferation of conflicts that turned Mexico into one of the world’s most violent democracies. Focusing then on Peru, the chapter traces the rise of the counterinsurgent state under military dictatorship, its expansion during the civil war, and its transformation under Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship. After defeating the rebels, the head of Fujimori’s secret service seized control of transnational drug-trafficking. Following the collapse of dictatorship, the adoption of a robust truth commission and the prosecution of Fujimori’s security apparatus led to the dismantling of the counterinsurgent state, prevented the outbreak of large-scale drug wars, and set Peru on a twenty-year path of relative peace. However, failure to adopt TJ “boosters” opened a new era of violence.

Emperors issued amnesties to address extensive and excessive punishments, pardon convicted imperial relatives and confidants, and forgive participants in rebellion. Several emperors realized that the legal system victimized a large portion of the population, including good people. Instead of implementing thorough reforms to the legal system, the emperors generally relied on temporary amnesties as a solution to the widespread criminalization of commoners. While amnesties allowed the population to tolerate the legal system, they directly distorted the concept of justice. The emperor forgave criminals but did not forget their crimes. Officials who implemented the law were blamed for causing chaos and suffering, while the emperor presented himself as a savior. Men, upon being convicted, lost their independence, dignity, and autonomy before the law. However, after being pardoned, they owed their lives and deaths to the throne.

If rights are at stake in the health of the body, it is now increasingly second nature to think they are in the aftermath of violence conflict or immense wrongdoing. Memory of violence is one way rights politics have been made meaningful. Bonny Ibhawoh observes that memory – including a right to memory – has been a focal point of rights mobilizations around the world. At the same time as recasting collective understanding of the past is itself an object of contemporary politics, competition over memory – including who is entitled to narrative privileging and why – has followed suit.

As Kamari Maxine Clarke likewise explores in her chapter, the intersection of rights and “transitional justice” in diverse situations has become one of the defining features of our time. Narrating the classic role of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of Apartheid, Clarke dramatizes the struggle over the meaning of transition, distinguishing between the “moralistic” goal of forgiveness and the more confrontational demand for accountability. For Clarke, the performativity of justice – it is always rendered by someone – means the history of human rights needs to be equally attentive to when it is not provided or when crimes are perpetrated or mistakes made in its name. What we see is that particular transitional justice speech acts enable the reproduction of particular types of power.

We explore how societies that have endured severe human rights violations confront and address their past and examine international mechanisms designed to protect human rights. This chapter asks: How can a society be rebuilt and made functional in the aftermath of human rights abuses? How can a culture of human rights be fostered? Should the pursuit of justice for perpetrators take precedence, or should reconciliation and forgiveness be the primary focus? We delve into the concept of transitional justice, its meaning, the key challenges to its implementation, and the effectiveness of various mechanisms in restoring justice and peace.