Liberal democracy is undergoing a crisis that cannot be understood apart from the expansion of conservative, reactionary, and authoritarian movements across the Global North and South. This is not merely a political process straining institutions but also a cultural and discursive phenomenon reshaping how societies relate to their past. The growth of these radical forces has turned memory into a privileged terrain of contestation, where the limits of what can be said, represented, and deemed legitimate in the public sphere are constantly renegotiated.
In this context, the radical right has questioned, appropriated, and destabilized the memory paradigm that dominated Western societies in recent decades. With national and regional variations, this paradigm had been consolidated around the imperative to remember human rights violations and to articulate collective narratives sustaining a minimal consensus on democratic values. The resurgence of authoritarian right-wing movements threatens these symbolic achievements by advancing alternative, revisionist, or denialist memories that trivialize past violence and seek to legitimize human rights violations in the present.
While these experiences share traits such as disinformation strategies, simplified historical narratives, and appeals to polarizing emotions, they retain specificities rooted in local trajectories. In Europe, for instance, debates over the legacy of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes have become sites of tension amid nationalist narratives seeking to relativize historical responsibility. In Latin America, the dispute centers on the memory of military dictatorships and the role of human rights struggles in building democracy. Yet in both contexts the outcome is similar: fragmented social memories and growing difficulty in sustaining coherent collective narratives.
Various theoretical approaches have analyzed these dynamics, linking them to populism, the resurgence of denialism, and political polarization. Our panel situates itself within this horizon seeking to foster a North–South dialogue to reflect on both the convergences and divergences of these experiences.
Cinthia Balé, Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales Universidad Nacional San Martín "Lessons from the Past? The Argentine Right and the Politics of Disappearance in the Maldonado Case"
Between August and October 2017, the disappearance and subsequent death of Santiago Maldonado deeply unsettled Argentine society. Driven by his relatives and the human rights movement, the case sparked a wave of social and political mobilization that spread from Patagonia to international arenas.
At first, the human rights movement successfully activated a medium-term memory framework that placed the case as an enforced disappearance and linked it to broader histories of state repression. Yet the right-wing government quickly sought to challenge this framing, aiming to deflect any responsibility for Santiago’s fate. Three politico-memorial operations were then set in motion: the denial of a long Mapuche memory that sought to situate the disappearance within struggles over land; the delegitimization of the human rights paradigm and its traditional actors; and the construction of an internal enemy through a security-oriented discourse.
This paper examines these strategies as key components in the formation of a counter-memory, later consolidated with the rise of La Libertad Avanza. It argues that the Maldonado case marked a turning point, opening a crisis in the democratic consensus built around the transitional memory of 1983, a crisis that continues to shape Argentina’s present democracy.
Custodio Velasco Mesa, Profesor Titular de Historia Contemporánea Universidad de Sevilla "La retórica contramemorial de la (ultra)derecha española: del discurso a la acción legislativa" In 2021, Pablo Casado (PP) carried out an equivocal tightrope walking exercise in Parliament in his approach to the Spanish Civil War. He defined the Spanish Civil War as the "confrontation between those who wanted democracy without law and those who wanted law without democracy". The play on words was not at all innocent. It hid strong convictions about the 1936 coup d'état and Francoism: he identified the Second Republic with a "lawless democracy", equated its defenders with the coup plotters and homologated the responsibilities of both in war, collective murders and repression. That was not, in fact, a novelty, but the consolidated manifestation of the discourse that, since the beginning of the twenty first century, the Spanish (extreme) right began to deploy in this regard. A discourse that can be reduced to three essential negations. First: the Second Republic was not a democratic regime. Second: the Civil War was not provoked by the coup d'état. And third: Francoism had no connections with Nazism and international fascism. What emerges from this denialist triad is easily identifiable: the coup d'état and the dictatorship were reactive phenomena in the face of the destruction of public order that "dominated" Spain during the Second Republic; the crimes of Francoism were a "logical" response to the crimes perpetrated by the left, with the consent of the "illegitimate" republican government. In the context of the development of civic organizations that demanded reparation, truth and justice for the victims of Francoism, the (extreme) right started a "war of memories" not without consequences. This contribution will examine this counter memorial discourse and its normative effects, materialized in the "concord laws" of 2024.
Carlos Artur Gallo, Universidad Federal de Pelotas "Shifts in meaning and disputes around politics of memory in Brazil - Perspectives from the Temer and Bolsonaro governments and current challenges"
Brazil, like its neighboring countries in the Southern Cone, lived under a civil-military dictatorship based on the precepts of the National Security Doctrine (NSD) between 1964 and 1985. After the end of the dictatorship, victims of political repression, their families, and organized civil society groups continuously organized to ensure that the governments that succeeded the State of exception established politics of memory in the country. Although limited in some respects, the fact is that between 1995 and 2015, several reparation measures were created and implemented by governments of different political persuasions in the country. Beginning in 2016, however, with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the beginning of Michel Temer's government (2016-2018), a process of disarticulation and weakening of these policies has been observed, with this dismantling reaching its peak under the Bolsonaro government (2019-2022). This work's central objective is to analyze and discuss the effects that governments positioned further to the right of the political spectrum had on the memory policy agenda in Brazil. Going further, it aims to observe how disputes surrounding the memory of the dictatorship unfolded in a context of the rise and strengthening of the new (extreme) right, the shifts in meaning that have occurred, and the challenges that have arisen in the new government of President Lula, which began in January 2023.
Analía Goldentul, Universidad de Buenos Aires "The “cultural battle” over memory: right-wing youth and representations of the recent past in Argentina"
This presentation analyzes the relationship that right-wing youth in Argentina establish with the country’s recent past, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2024. Drawing on the theoretical tools provided by the field of recent past studies and the sociology of culture, it addresses two complementary dimensions.
First, it explores the representations these young people construct regarding political violence and State terrorism, as well as the ways in which they shape and dispute the figures of victims and perpetrators within what they define as a “cultural battle” against left-wing and progressive sectors. This axis makes it possible to examine the interpretive (and moral) frameworks through which they engage with recent history and, in particular, the ways they produce new meanings around memory and responsibility.
Second, it analyzes the media, spaces, and practices through which these representations are constructed and updated: books —considered both as material and symbolic objects that play a privileged role in the transmission of memories—, digital social networks, and public events such as political rallies, book presentations, and street actions. The presentation examines how these youths access texts, what their reading habits and broader cultural consumptions are, how they participate in book fairs or public events, and what kinds of relationships they establish with authors, publishers, and reading communities.
In doing so, the paper reflects on the ways in which memories of the recent past are reactivated and contested by right-wing youth in Argentina, attending to both their material and symbolic dimensions.
20260731T154520260731T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires10.13. Democracies on the Line: Memory Battles and Far-Right Challenges across the Global North and South III [ES]SV303MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
