Governing the Legacies of Political Violence: Memory, Security, and Political Agency in Latin America

Political violence does not end when armed conflict subsides or authoritarian rule is formally replaced. Its legacies persist through memories, institutions, security practices, political identities, and struggles over authority. This panel examines how Latin American societies govern, contest, and transform these legacies, asking how political violence reshapes both state power and the agency of actors seeking to redefine political and social orders. The panel brings together complementary perspectives on four interconnected dimensions. First, it examines memory, truth, archives, and transitional justice as arenas in which societies negotiate the meaning and consequences of past violence. Second, it explores how states and institutions respond to conflict through security practices, institutional reforms, peacebuilding, and new forms of governance. Third, it considers how victims, communities, social movements, and historically marginalized groups become or contest political subjects through processes of memory, resistance, and decolonial political agency. Fourth, it investigates how these forms of agency extend beyond national borders through transnational solidarity, non-state diplomacy, and alternative forms of international political action. Rather than treating transitional justice, security, peacebuilding, and international relations as separate fields, the panel approaches them as interconnected processes through which political authority is reproduced, challenged, and transformed in the aftermath and continuing presence of political violence. The panel welcomes theoretical, comparative, and empirical contributions on Latin America and other contexts of the Global South addressing political violence, transitional justice, memory, truth commissions, archives, human rights, security and securitization, peace processes, institutional transformation, political subjectivity, social movements, decolonial agency, transnational solidarity, and non-state forms of diplomacy and governance.