and other historical attempts at rendering justice for serious crimes were not at the time conceptualized as ‘transitional justice’. It is therefore more correct to state that contemporary debates about transitional justice originate in discussions about how the emerging democracies in Latin America should address serious human rights abuses committed by the prior dictatorships (Arthur 2009). With some exceptions, these discussions were based on a statecentric understanding of agents and forums for accountability, truth-seeking and other ways of addressing gross human rights
violations committed during the reign of the military dictatorships