Dealing With the Legacy of Authoritarianism ─ The olitics of the Past?in Southern European Democracies

This book addresses such themes by dealing with two dimensions of authoritarian legacies in Southern European democracies: repressive institutions and human rights abuses. The thrust of this book is that we should view transitional justice as part of a broader ‘politics of the past’: an ongoing process in which elites and society under democratic rule revise the meaning of the past in terms of what they hope to achieve in the present.

This book was published as a special issue of South European Society and Politics.

Antonio Costa Pinto is a professor of politics and contemporary European history at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. He is presently the President of the Portuguese Political Science Association. He has published extensively on fascism, authoritarianism, democratisation and transitional justice in Southern Europe.

Leonardo Morlino is professor of Political Science at Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane (Florence, Italy) and President of the International Political Science Association in 2009-12. His main contributions are on change of regimes, consolidation of democracy, qualities of democracies with a special attention to southern and eastern Europe and Latin America.