David Carey Jr. , I Ask for Justice: Maya Women, Dictators, and Crime in Guatemala, 1898–1944 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2014), pp. xxv + 335, £37.00, hb.
emphasise one side of the equation. The focus on critical junctures is certainly provocative and may well inspire future work in this area. Although used loosely throughout the book, the notion of ‘critical juncture’ in political science refers to specific historical circumstances in which constraints on action are relaxed and the status quo becomes unstable and vulnerable to disruptions caused by contingent events or factors. But once critical junctures are ‘resolved’, they produce legacies that narrow down the scope for innovation and choice. It follows that the resolution of any of the critical junctures identified by Lessa should somehow condition the momentum in favour or against the strengthening of progressive responses to the legacies of state repression. As time goes by the ‘criticalness’ of future ‘moments’ is greatly reduced as the path forward becomes more and more overdetermined by past events and choices. In other words, subsequent evidentiary, international, political or opposition ‘moments’ are more likely to reproduce on-going power imbalances and policy trajectories, rather than disrupt them. This begs two sets of questions. The first one is how we identify a critical juncture or moment when we see one. What makes the release of new evidence an ‘evidentiary moment’? Does it depend on the previous trajectory of the country? Greater conceptual clarity might be needed for other scholars to be able to export Lessa’s framework. Second, how exactly do these ‘moments’ set cases along specific paths? In other words, what are the mechanisms of institutional change at play? Answering these questions will require additional efforts to theorise the processes by which each ‘critical juncture’ affects the resources and discursive frameworks of the actors involved, and how those effects may or may not be countervailed by subsequent shocks to the system. It might be productive to think systematically about the effects of sequencing on transitional justice outcomes. For example, what happens if evidentiary moments precede international ones, or if opposition backlashes occur before the onset of international campaigns against impunity? This is an important addition to the field of memory studies and transitional justice. More than offering a rich and informative overview of Argentine and Uruguayan recent histories, the latter of which is remarkably understudied yet fascinating, Lessa’s approach weaves together interdisciplinary insights to put forward a series of heuristic tools that allow us to explore the subject from interesting and novel angles.