Democratic polity, punitiveness and Walter Benjamin's concept of history (Law and Society Association annual meeting, Mexico City, Mexico, June 2017) (original) (raw)

Transition to Democracy and Penal Policy The Case of Argentina

This essay aims at examining the development of penal policy in Argentina during the first stage of the transition to democracy. It analyzes the emergence of an elitist mode of penal policy making, which isolated and protected it from the public and persisted beyond changes in governmental alliances. It also shows how penal policy had initially in that context a liberal orientation that became more ambivalent since the 1990s, including measures towards the increase of penal severity and extension. As well, it explores the conditions of possibility of this mode of penal policy making and its changing orientations and its effects in the evolution of punitiveness in this period. This study of a national case could be useful for advancing our understanding of how this complex political and social change is connected with the field of punishment and could be an initial contribution to a line of comparative research about this relation in other contexts that experienced recent similar transformations.

Consequences of Post-Fascism in Security Policies in Spain

Security Dialogues /Безбедносни дијалози, 2015

The paper analyses the features of the Spanish criminal justice system from the perspective of the late-democratisation condition of the Spanish polity. The text sees an almost uninterrupted expansionism and a relatively high level of severity as basic traits of the evolution of the Spanish criminal justice system. Consequently, the paper examines those features from the viewpoints of legal reforms, institutional practices and collective perceptions and expectations experienced since the end of the autocratic period. Finally, the article investigates some reasons which may explain the relatively high punitiveness of the Spanish criminal justice system, before adding a coda on the changes of the penal system fostered by the Great Recession.

The punitive turn in Spain. Is the welfare state able to resist it

2017

In recent years there is a tendency to carry out penal reforms in Spain very often, as it also happens in other countries. During its twenty years of existence, the Spanish penal code has already been modified more than 30 times, on an average of more than one penal reform by year. Most of them have increased punitiveness by widening the categories of crimes, raising the penalties, and making the penitentiary system less flexible, especially for some criminal offences, all leading to a very high prison population. The investigation has shown that there are many processes and practices indicating that the law and order model is consolidating itself in the Spanish penal system, leading to a punitive turn. Nevertheless this process has a different intensity at each phase, being stronger at the legislative stage and softer in the penitentiary enforcement phase. One of the main conclusions is, therefore, that the designed instrument is ideal for measuring the degree of penetration of the...

Judiciary Involvement in Authoritarian Repression and Transitional Justice: The Spanish Case in Comparative Perspective

Why have some democracies made considerable progress in prosecuting dictatorship-era human rights violations or in publicly exposing the truth about repression while others still have amnesty laws that prevent, or at least hinder, even the judicial review of such abuses? This article compares Spain, Chile and Argentina to understand the impact of their contrasting histories of repression on how they have dealt with their violent pasts. I assess whether a greater degree of legal repression and direct judicial involvement in repression explains why there is more resistance to prosecuting those responsible for human rights violations, establishing truth commissions or annulling the political sentences of the past during democratization. Once democracy has been consolidated, different dynamics may emerge, but this history of judicial complicity has proved to be a key factor in understanding the continuous lack of judicial accountability in Spain.

SPAIN MUST BE DEFENDED: EXPLAINING THE CRIMINALIZATION OF POLITICAL DISSENT IN CATALONIA

State Crime, 2020

This paper asks how we can explain the remarkable punitive turn against the political opponents of a liberal democratic state in twenty-first-century Europe. It uses Michel Foucault's analysis as a point of departure for understanding how the form of state power witnessed in Catalonia is entirely consistent with a Westphalian fixation with the indissoluble unity of statehood. Moreover, we identify a classic dual strategy of criminal-ization and depoliticization that will be familiar to critical students of the criminal justice system. The form of justice resorted to by the postfascist Spanish state is one that seeks to replace politics with law; to impose a kind of legalized violence that is at the same time a proxy for war and a proxy for politics. Yet, in the process of presenting state repression as having only legal-rather than social or political content-all the Spanish state can do is repack age this political struggle in a form that reflects the war-making origins of the state. We argue, therefore, that in the Catalan case, as in countless other political conflicts, the autonomy of the political realm is a fallacy: the political realm cannot hide its violent origins.

Punitive decriminalization? The repression of political dissent through administrative law and nuisance ordinances in Spain (in Peršak, N. (Ed.). (2016). Regulation and Social Control of Incivilities. Routledge)

The authoritarian past of Spain, ruled from 1939 to 1977 by a military dictatorship that founded its legitimacy on victory in a civil war, bequeathed a political legacy that still resonates into the present. Attitudes rooted in the past appear to endure in relation to the regulation of ‘public order’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’, the two main formulas with which a broad range of control techniques beyond the reach of the criminal justice system have been applied. Especially affecting politically and economically marginalised groups, these measures regulate many aspects of daily life and activities. The focus here is on the exercise of (peaceful) political dissent and protest. Although control over such activities might not be the main function of these regulations (more clearly oriented towards the control of economically excluded sectors of the population), it is one of the aspects more often perceived as problematic and openly criticised in both the media and academia.

Punishment, Democracy and Transitional Justice in Argentina (1983-2015)

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2017

Latin America has neither suffered the majority of mass atrocities in the contemporary world nor the worst of them but, after a sustained period of transition to democracy, it holds the record for the most domestic trials for human rights abuses. Argentina is an emblematic case in Latin America and the world. Due to the early development of its human rights trials, their social impact and their scale, it has a leading role in what is known as ‘the justice cascade’. Until recently, leading scholars in sociology of punishment have studied the penality of ‘ordinary crimes’ through causally deep and global narratives largely from the perspective of the Global North. State crimes and regional paths of transitional justice have been neglected in their accounts. This paper will question this state of affairs – or ‘parallelism’ – through an exploration of the punishment of both ‘common crimes’ and ‘state crimes’ in Argentina, thus contributing to the growing body of scholarship on southern ...