The Afterlives of Historical Commissions: How Official Discourses Travel Through the Political and Public Sphere

Reckoning with conflicted pasts is often considered essential for understanding the present and imagining more just futures. Historical commissions — whether situated within or outside transitional justice — are assumed to contribute to these transformations by reshaping public understandings of violence, authoritarianism, and historical injustice. As state institutions, they operate beyond strictly academic settings and serve a political function within broader state approaches to the politics of the past. By elevating specific events to national attention, they actively intervene in public discourse and illuminate how historical processes continue to shape contemporary life. The reports produced by these commissions seek not only to clarify past events but also to re-signify them. Their narratives aim to transform the historical imaginary, values, and symbols that govern societies, and to lay the groundwork for measures to address historical injustices. In this sense, commission reports are not neutral repositories of findings; they are communicative tools designed to transform how societies relate to their pasts. Despite these ambitions, we still know little about what happens to these re-signified accounts of the past once the commissions finish their mandates and hand in the reports. This paper presents initial findings from The Afterlives of Historical Commissions, a project that examines how the messages and discourses generated by commissions circulate across different domains of the political and public sphere, and whether they ultimately permeate society in ways that shape collective memory. The paper speaks directly to this section’s core questions about communication, mediation, and audiences. It examines how official narratives move (or don’t) through society; what official commissions intend to communicate; who speaks or transmits to which audiences; and how these messages are mediated by institutions and media.