How are authoritarian elites and their collaborators handled in the aftermath of democratic transitions? The modern discipline of documenting transitional justice began with the Nuremberg trials for Nazi perpetrators. The trials shifted the way the international community thinks about accountability for human rights violations committed by authoritarian regimes and are generally the most well-known example of transitional justice. Yet, there exist different procedures of extra-judicial transitional justice—including lustration, truth commissions, and purges—that hold human rights violators accountable and remove them from positions of power without formally sentencing them.

In this episode, we speak with Professor Monika Nalepa, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, about her new book After Authoritarianism and her monumental work building the Global Transitional Justice Dataset at the Transitional Justice and Democratic Stability Lab. We talk about the different implications of transitional justice for both leaders and rank-and-file members of authoritarian regimes and the more recent global phenomenon of democratic backsliding.

Learn more about After Authoritarianism and read it here.

This podcast is produced in partnership with the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. For more information, please visit their website at ThePearsonInstitute.org

Access the transcript here.

Podcast Production Credits:

Interviewing: Olga Bednarek and Isabella Pestana de Andrade do Nascimento
Editing: Nishita Karun
Production: Hannah Balikci