Joannie Jean - Battles for Memory and Justice in Chile: Struggles for Remembrance, Legitimacy and Accountability

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This book is the result of my doctoral research. My fieldwork and the writing process took place before the explosion of social movements and unrest in Chile that led to the plebiscite. Which mean that the 20182022 period is unfortunately not covered but would be most likely to be covered in future investigations.

The past and its representation in the public space have been a source of conflict since the end of the Pinochet regime. Spectral-like, these matters reappear in the present in many forms as organizations of memory and human rights struggle over the meaning and importance of the past, as well as the legitimacy that must be granted to actors mobilizing this past in the public arena. However, these struggles and conflicts occur in particular sociopolitical dynamics and engage a multitude of actors with different representations of the past. This state of affairs calls for a reformulation of the conceptualization of the role of collective actors in order to highlight these differences in the way of representing the past, certainly, but also in the analogous and opposite strategies of doing so.

This book addresses the work of seven organizations of memory and human rights in Santiago, Chile, and the struggles in which they are engaged. From a multidisciplinary perspective, it undertakes, diachronically, the reconstruction of the main debates that have arisen around the themes of impunity, truth, and memory.