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Rather than seek retribution and reconciliation, Spain's political leaders agreed to place the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship in the past. Omar G. Encarnación examines the political factors that made possible the "politics of forgetting" and explores the advantages and consequences of democratizing without confronting the past.

A key contention of the transitional justice movement is that the more comprehensive and vigorous the effort to bring justice to a departed authoritarian regime for its political crimes, the better the democratization results. This essay challenges this common assumption with empirical evidence from the Iberian Peninsula, where the global wave of democratization of the late twentieth century was born. In Portugal, political trials and bureaucratic purges intended to cleanse the state and society of the authoritarian past nearly derailed the transition to democracy by descending into a veritable political witch-hunt. In Spain, by contrast, forgetting and moving on prevailed, an approach that facilitated the country's emergence as the paradigmatic example of a successful democratic transition. Among the many lessons suggested by these counter-intuitive examples is that there is no pre-ordained outcome to any attempt at transitional justice. This is so because the principal factors driving the impulse toward justice against an old regime tend to be political in nature rather than ethical or legal. In Portugal, the rise of transitional justice mirrored the radicalism of the left-wing revolution that launched the transition to democracy. In Spain, the absence of transitional justice reflected the pragmatism imposed by the self-reinvention of the authoritarian regime and the political trauma inflected by the Spanish Civil War. Adapted from the source document.

This essay explains the gay-rights revolution in Latin America marked by the legalization of same-sex marriage in Argentina. Among the factors examined are the use of human-rights rhetoric to end anti-gay discrimination, the employment of the Internet to mainstream gay culture, the creation of a gay market to leverage clout for the gay community, and critical alliances with the political establishment. These explanations suggest that the Latin American gay-rights revolution is rooted in political strategizing rather than in social change, which explains the paradoxical trend of rising anti-gay violence in the midst of a gay-rights boom.