Guillermo Trejo, University of Notre Dame, Indiana,
Lucía Tiscornia, University College Dublin,
Juan Albarracín, University of Illinois, Chicago

Why do some countries that transition from authoritarian rule to democracy experience outbreaks of large-scale criminal violence and criminal wars while others develop relatively peacefully? In Accountability Shock. Why Transitional Justice Prevents Criminal Wars in New Democracies (Cambridge University Press), Juan Albarracín (UIC), Lucía Tiscornia (University College Dublin) and Guillermo Trejo (University of Notre Dame) demonstrate how robust transitional justice processes – combining truth commissions with prosecution of autocratic-era atrocities – prevent criminal violence in new democracies. By holding authoritarian specialists in violence accountable, new democracies can break state impunity, preventing them from becoming key actors in the production of large-scale criminal violence and reshaping the logic of state coercion in democracy.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/accountability-shock/18DEC6D8061385276056F15D2A88BA32