Politics of Impunity: Torture, the Armed Forces and the Failure of Transitional Justice in Brazil

Politics of Impunity investigates the failure of the anti-impunity agenda in Brazil, from the release of the truth commission report denouncing the crimes of the military regime (1964-1985) in 2014, to the election of the former-paratrooper and far-Right leader Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Connecting debates on critical military studies, transitional justice and memory studies, the book moves beyond the conditions of implementation of accountability measures. It examines the conditions of possibility of the global anti-impunity agenda: when, how and why the question of impunity came to dominate debates on large-scale political violence.

Drawing lessons from the Brazilian case, the book provides a new reading of transitional justice, investigating alternative ways of understanding militarism in the absence of warfare. It reveals the ways in which narratives of accountability and the memory of militarism work to demarcate and restrict what counts as unacceptable violence, who counts as victims/perpetrators and what counts as reasonable forms of justice and resistance.