Formulating and Implementing Truth Commission Recommendations: Methodological Issues

Studying the formulation and implementation of truth commission recommendations is a challenging task, even more so in a comparative perspective. This paper discusses how our project team went about with the data collection and analysis for 13 truth commissions in 11 Latin American countries. The paper addresses various methodological and ethical aspects involved, such as the passage of time and interviewees’ position to the legacy of the commissions, the use of primary and secondary sources to trace the implementation of those recommendations, and criteria applied for the construction of a database to facilitate cross-case comparison. Based on the insights and experiences of this data-collection and analysis process, the paper reflects on the core issue of causality in social sciences.