The Far-Right Challenge to Transitional Justice: Impacts, Resistance, and Democratic Resilience

Over the last decade, transitional justice (TJ) processes worldwide have come under increasing pressure from far-right mobilization, democratic backsliding, and the shrinking of civic and human rights spaces. While TJ has traditionally been associated with democratization, accountability, and the prevention of future violence, recent political developments raise urgent questions about the resilience of these achievements in contexts marked by polarization and authoritarian tendencies.

This panel examines the challenges that far-right politics and processes of radicalization pose to TJ institutions and human rights actors. Across Latin America, Europe, the United States, and beyond, political actors have sought to reinterpret or deny histories of state violence, undermine accountability mechanisms, stigmatize victims and human rights organizations, and restrict civic spaces dedicated to truth and justice These developments demonstrate how struggles over past violence are deeply intertwined with contemporary conflicts over democracy and political power. For instance, cases from Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Peru, the United States, Northern Ireland, and other contexts illustrate how shrinking spaces and different forms of attacks on accountability institutions, funding cuts, restrictions on civil society participation can undermine the rights to truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence.

The panel also seeks to highlight the strategies of resistance developed by victims, social movements, memory activists, and human rights organizations. Through a comparative lens, it explores both the impacts of these challenges and the forms of resilience that emerge in response. More broadly, it asks how TJ can be sustained—and contribute to democratic resilience.