Post-Transitional Justice and Truth Recovery for Missing Persons: Lessons from Southern Europe

Why do certain post-conflict societies defer the recovery of those who forcibly disappeared, even after a fully-fledged democratic regime is consolidated? More interestingly, why do the same societies decide to unearth certain inconvenient aspects of their past, albeit tardily? The lecture will attempt to explore precisely this decision of a growing number of consolidated democracies to become belated truth-seekers. Despite the fact that ‘post-transitional justice’ has gained currency over the past decade, little theoretical and empirical light has been shed on the causal mechanism that accounts for this phenomenon. To this end, the paper compares the ‘critical cases’ of Spain, Cyprus and Greece. Despite democratization, the exhumation of mass graves containing the victims from the two periods of violence in Cyprus (1963-1974) and the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) was delayed until the early 2000s, when both countries decided to deal with their past. Contrary to this growing use of exhumations as an instrument of dealing with certain violent/traumatic chapters of their past, Greece is one of the few countries in Southern Europe that resists this norm.

Speaker: Iosif Kovras, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University