HL90DF: Human Rights and Transitional Justice in Latin America

Instructor: Debbie Sharnak
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:00 - 5:00

This course will examine the emergence of the twin phenomenon of human rights advocacy and transitional justice across Latin America, exploring the original debates and major players within the movement, a few of the larger case studies in the past three decades throughout the region, and the central issues now facing the field. We will examine how a human rights discourse emerged in these nations, and how the countries dealt in different ways with the repressive legal, cultural, and political legacies of authoritarianism. We will examine how human rights definitions changed and intersected with calls for justice within the emerging the democratic governments, and how accountability claims evolved in the decades following the military rule based on domestic political battles and changing international norms. As a group, we will focus on existing literature on justice and truth-telling in the politics of transition, as well as scholarship on social memory and historical commemorations by using literature, film, testimonies, government documents, and scholarly articles.