The construction of a shared narrative of the past has always been a key element of state-making and of democratic imagination. Yet, in societies marked by violent pasts, memory becomes a contested arena where different actors struggle over the meaning of justice, rights, and citizenship. This panel explores how memories of dictatorship, colonialism, and political violence shape contemporary human rights discourses and democratic life in three countries – Argentina, Brazil, and Italy – whose trajectories, though distinct, share the presence of deeply divided memory cultures.
In all three cases, the tension between conflicting narratives of the past undermines the construction of a common understanding of traumatic history and, consequently, of a shared vision of the future. Argentina continues to debate the legacy of dictatorship and the categories of victimhood and justice it produced. Brazil faces unresolved conflicts between colonial heritage, extractivist modernization, and the survival of indigenous and traditional ways of life. Italy still negotiates the heritage of fascism and the long shadow of political violence from the 1970s.
Although the human rights frameworks and political conflicts and history differ widely across these countries, the internal debates about democracy and human rights related issues are strongly shaped and produced by divergent interpretations of the past. Competing communities of memory translate into contrasting definitions of what counts as “victim” (or in some cases “human”), which actors deserve recognition, and which kinds of violence deserve remembrance or reparation. For instance, in Brazil, human rights discourses increasingly include the defense of non-human actors and the environmental dimension of violence, where ecocide and ethnocide intersect. In Argentina, debates on justice for the desaparecidos coexist with new struggles over economic and environmental violence. In Italy, discussions on police violence, migrants’ rights, and state repression of antagonistic movements are refracted through persistent ambiguities in the national memory of fascism.
From a semiotic perspective, these dynamics reveal that human rights function as a discursive field of negotiation, where different communities of memory construct specific symbolic boundaries and temporalities. The panel adopts the lens of the semiotics of culture, which understands culture as the non-hereditary transmission of information across generations, to investigate how societies encode, contest, and transform their difficult pasts into models for collective identity and democratic participation.
By comparing these cases, the panel aims to highlight how memory-making mechanisms, such as selective commemoration, affect not only the representation of past violence but also the imagination of possible futures. We argue that divided memory cultures generate conflicting conceptions of democracy, justice, and even humanity itself. Bringing together perspectives from semiotics, memory studies, and human rights theory, this panel explores the political and ecological stakes of remembering in times of crisis, asking how communities may re-imagine democracy through plural, inclusive, and sustainable cultures of memory.
Cristina Demaria, University of Bologna.
Francesco Mazzucchelli, University of Bologna.
“Continuities of political violence in italy: repression and violence between conflictual memories and selective remembering”
The discursive field of memory in Italy remains deeply divided. The legacy of fascism, never fully reprocessed, continues to inform the country’s political and cultural debates. The incomplete transition from dictatorship to democracy, together with the repression of the 1970s (“Years of Lead”) and the enduring presence of selective and self-contradictory national memory narratives, reveals what could be considered a continuity of political violence that extends from the difficult past to the present day. This paper explores how competing narratives of the past magnify (or narcotize) such continuity of "forms of political violence and repression". By analysing contemporary examples of political discourse and activist practices, as well as examples of filmic and media representations, the paper will try to investigate which thematic roles and values structure these narratives, how are different visions of the past and future mobilized to legitimize or contest state violence and how do communities of memory emerge to reinterpret and negotiate, in often antagonistic ways, the difficult memories of fascism, terrorism, and contemporary political repression? The appearance of "human right narratives" is something quite new, and our hypothesis is that the notion of human rights in Italy is still new or contested, while the unresolved legacies of twentieth-century violence still shape the democratic imagination of the present and the future. Indeed, in tracing these tensions, the paper argues that the Italian case illustrates a delayed emergence of a human rights discourse, gradually constructed through the practices of feminist, anti-fascist, and intersectional movements that link opposition to state repression with broader struggles for social and gender justice.
Lizel Tornay, Universidad de Buenos Aires. "Building memory with young people. Forty years after the end of the last military dictatorship in Argentina". On the 40th anniversary of the end of the last dictatorship in Argentina, a far right government was democratically elected with broad support from young people. The ‘Never Again Pact,’ which with its symbolic power had shaped political, social, and cultural life during democratic governments, showed signs of cracking. What happened to the intense work of memory building that had been done? Is it enough to remember? The link between the imperative of memory and the goal of not repeating the horrors of the past does exist, but we need to know where to find that link (Pisanty, 2019). What issues are affecting young people today? Human rights violations, institutional violence and intolerance have not ceased to occur. How can we address the legacies of the traumatic past with young people, starting from their uncertainties in the present? What languages enable them to approach it? What are the contributions of new categories of analysis for those who, although they do not have direct experience of having lived through these traumatic events of the past, are nevertheless often involved, as non participating observers, in everyday microtraumas of which they feel neither ‘victims’ nor ‘guilty’? This paper will analyse the experiences of young people aged 15 to 20 who participate in various artistic productions. Is it possible to identify agencies that challenge the irreversibility of these legacies? Work carried out by the UBA/SPEME research team: Lizel Tornay, Victoria Alvarez, Fabricio Laino Sanchís, Mariana Paganini.
Sandra Raggio, CPM - Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, La Plata.
"The memory work of new generations and the possibilities for reconfiguring community projects".
The reflections that guide this presentation aim to challenge the classic notion of intergenerational transmission and the instructive function of the past for younger generations. The classic axiom states that history must be told so that past mistakes are not repeated.
Focusing on traumatic, painful or sensitive pasts, transmission is said to be the key to ensuring that history does not repeat itself. However, the experiences of building social memories led by the new generations reveal other meanings of this work of constructing the past. They refer to memories linked to ideas of community and ways in which new generations can connect with the experiences of older generations as ways of navigating and redefining their place in it.
Rather than guaranteeing that something will not happen again, memory work is associated with ways of shaping individuals in relation to their communities, present and future projects, and therefore the emergence of the new. In this notion, transmission is conceptualised not as a linear intergenerational process but as a dialectical process where what prevails is the exchange between generations to provoke new narratives and experiences.
Inscription in a regime of presentist neoliberal historicity, these memory projects enable the emergence of experiences that run counter to the ahistoricity of the present time, stripped of its projection into the future.
For this reflection, we will analyse the experience of the “Youth and Memory” Programme developed by the Commission for Memory of the Province of Buenos Aires since 2002, in which young people from communities research their recent history and their present.
Carlo Andrea Tassinari, University of Bologna. "Beyond the Human: Competing Memories in the Belo Monte Power Plant Controversy". In Brazil, as in Argentina, the struggle for human rights has long been a defining banner of the liberal left. That was particularly true for the democratization process led in the early twenty-first century by President Lula, fostering the public recognition of the violent past of the military dictatorship and resulting in the institution of the National Comission for Truth in 2011.
This paper, however, examines the emergence of a new form of human rights activism—one that opposes large infrastructural projects promoted by the liberal Brazilian left itself. Focusing on the emblematic case of the Belo Monte Power Plant, we argue that the very meanings of “human rights” and of the “violent past” to be redressed vary greatly depending on the perspective adopted toward this project. For the pro–Belo Monte camp and for Norte Energia, the consortium operating the dams, the plant is presented as a vehicle of human rights, capable of repairing the historical violence of poverty and underdevelopment at both local and national levels. Representing the transformation of ways of life caused by Belo Monte as a form of past violence to be overcome is thus a key rhetorical strategy in this debate.
Conversely, for the broad movement opposing the project, Belo Monte and its environmental consequences constitute a violation of the human rights of the ribeirinhos and Indigenous peoples, whose remembrance of the homes from which they were displaced functions as a practice of resistance. Through a semiotic analysis of these conflicting narratives, we reveal the underlying plurality of notions of “violent pasts” and “human rights” in this political context, showing how the idea of human rights here extends even beyond the human.
20260731T173020260731T1900America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires11.5. Memory, Human Rights, and the Legacy of Political Violence: Comparing Communities of Memory in Argentina, Brazil, and ItalySV106MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
