Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Sociology

Advisor

Carolina Bank Muñoz

Committee Members

Susan Opotow

Jayne Mooney

Kregg Hetherington

Subject Categories

Latin American Studies | Other Sociology | Politics and Social Change | Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies | Sociology

Keywords

Archives, Transitional Justice, State Violence, Political Sociology, Knowledge Production, Paraguay

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Archive of Terror in Paraguay as an archival apparatus with a double life: first constituted under the Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989) as an instrument of surveillance and repression, and later reconstituted under democracy as a source of evidence for transitional justice, memory politics, and reparations. It asks how the documentary relationship produced under dictatorship carried over into the democratic transition, and under what conditions archival knowledge could substantiate recognition for victims of past state violence.

The dissertation addresses a gap between two bodies of scholarship. Critical studies of transitional politics emphasize continuity across regime change but rarely analyze the archive as an instrument of that continuity. Scholarship on archives of repression examines the authority and silences of state records but less often follows that authority across political regimes. To bridge this gap, I develop the concept of the double life of the archives, which names the persistence of evidentiary logic, epistemological structure, and institutional authority across the archive’s repressive and reparative uses.

Methodologically, the dissertation draws on Michael Burawoy’s Extended Case Method and combines archival research, ethnographic observation, oral history, semi-structured interviews, and descriptive statistics from reparations reports. It treats the Archive of Terror as a local site shaped by two international structures: Cold War counterinsurgency and post–Cold War transitional politics.

The findings show that the archive’s public use did not simply reverse its repressive function. Transitional justice repurposed the archive through individualized, documentary, and economized claims, while the collection itself preserved both documents of repression and documents of resistance.

Repressive archives contain an extraordinary amount of information, but their capacity to prove state violence is far more elusive than transitional justice often assumes. This creates the evidentiary paradox of repression archives: the records on which recognition depends often silence the violence they are expected to document. The dissertation concludes that archives of state violence are active sites of knowledge production, capable both of substantiating recognition and reproducing impunity.

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