3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course invites students to examine an idea central to theories of transitional justice: that holding perpetrators of mass violence legally accountable enables transitions from war to peace and authoritarianism to democracy. We will examine this idea by focusing on Latin America, where social movements for legal accountability and human rights prosecutions have flourished since the 1980s, influencing law and transitional justice mechanisms globally. By engaging ethnographies of transition, we will critically examine concepts such as justice, accountability, catastrophic violence, transition, and the rule of law, comparing how anthropologists and lawyers reason, formulate questions, and engage evidence.