Leigh Payne’s monograph Unsettling Accounts is important in two ways. First of all, it analyzes publications and documents of agents of state violence from four societies that are icons of extreme repression and violation of human rights (and in at least the first two cases, of an explicitly neofascist apparatus): Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. These four cases diverge fundamentally in the institutional circumstances and structure of state violence — particularly the rhetoric and discourse strategies used to defend it to the citizenry and in international forums — and the analysis, accommodation, and consequences of it in a subsequent democratic institutionalization and public accounting (especially the relationship of state violence to far-reaching sociohistorical circumstances that turn on the issue of circumstantial exceptionalism). Yet in all four cases there has been enormous international interest. Payne’s discussion of the phenomenon of state violence (or state terrorism, to use Eduardo Luis Duhalde’s...

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