Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (review)

In the past three and a half decades, truth commissions have emerged as key institutional bodies in countries emerging from periods of state-sponsored violence. In the wake of human rights catastrophes, fledgling democracies have turned to restorative justice as a means to confront the past and to allow societies to heal. In this important work, political scientist Leigh A. Payne makes the unsettling claim that a public accounting of the past—in particular confessions of state violence—brings about neither truth nor reconciliation. Rather, Payne claims, such confessions are "unsettling accounts" that are ultimately necessary and beneficial to democracies in a state of transition. Considering perpetrators' accounts a kind of public performance, Payne argues that there is a theatrical aspect to confessions, based on a script that is performed on a stage and that engages an audience. This "confessional performance" puts the past into discourse and invites competing and complementary accounts by families of victims, survivors, and human rights advocates. If confessions do not necessarily disclose and dispel the harms of the past, they do enable political engagement and political change. As Payne argues, "contentious debate enhances democratic practices by provoking political participation, contestation, and competition" (p. 3).

Unsettling Accounts focuses on four case studies: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to restore a deeply divided society through public testimonials and confessions of apartheid-era violence; Chile's truth commission, the Rettig Commission, which investigated the thousands of deaths and disappearances that took place under Pinochet's military junta; the National Commission on the Disappeared in Argentina, which documented the terrorist activities of the state during Argentina's "Dirty War"; and the attempts by human-rights groups to bring to light the human-rights violations that occurred under Brazil's military regime. Each of these case studies mobilizes a different form of justice, from amnesty in exchange for confessions to politically motivated crimes (South Africa) to blanket amnesty (Brazil) to a combination of truth commissions and judicial trials (Argentina). The work is organized around a variety of confessional modes. Chapters two and three, which focus on Argentina, consider two diametrically opposite tropes: remorse and heroic pride. Chapters four and five, which concentrate on Chile, examine occurrences of sadism and denial. Chapters six and seven, which focus on Brazil, consider modes that speak by other means: silence, fiction, and lies. The last two chapters, which center on South Africa, examine the phenomena of amnesia and betrayal. Each chapter pays close attention to the responses by survivors, human-rights groups, and the public to these confessional modes, as well as the larger effects the confessions have on the nations in question.

This work is to be applauded for its close reading of historical events and its rich mixture of narrative and analysis. It is based on significant archival research in four countries and considers a variety of historical material, including scholarly works, journal articles, state documents, human rights reports, interviews, and articles in the press. In general, each chapter concentrates on one figure and takes this figure as a focal point for a larger, comparative analysis of the mode or trope at hand. Chapter two, for example, focuses on the case of Adolfo Scilingo, the former Argentine navy captain whose haunted confession to participation in two death flights (which resulted in the deaths of 30 men, women, and children) shocked and mobilized the nation. Confirming the events recorded by Argentina's truth commission and various other sources, his high-profile case led to further confessions and accusations, thus effectively putting an end to impunity in the country. Payne believes, however, that Scilingo's remorseful confession did not bring about the kind of reconciliation often sought by advocates of restorative justice. Confessions of remorse and contrition, Payne argues, are rarely believed and place an unfair moral burden on victims' families and survivors.

Chapter three focuses on another...