Join us for a conversation on the untold stories of the military families of Argentina's last dictatorship (1976–83). Eleonora Natale's book 'Military families, political violence, and transitional justice in Argentina' uncovers the everyday scenarios of political violence from the perspective of those linked to the 'perpetrators'.

The book explores the personal and collective lives of junior officers of the regime - many now imprisoned for crimes against humanity - their spouses, and adult children. Based on extensive ethnographic research, it examines the complexities of kinship in the military world, and the long road to justice as experienced by the families of the accused, showing how they lived, normalised and memorialised extreme forms of violence. A must-read for scholars in military studies, transitional justice and Latin American history, this groundbreaking study offers a compelling and unique analysis of one of Argentina’s darkest periods.

The event will be followed by a drinks reception.

About the speakers:

Dr Eleonora Natale is Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and Coordinator of the Latin American Security Research Group. As an ethnographer specialising in military issues in Latin America, her research encompasses Argentina’s last dictatorship, the Falklands/Malvinas War, and the involvement of the Brazilian military in the Amazon. She is especially interested in the everyday aspects of militarisation, the ethnographic method, and the challenges of conducting empirical research on conflict, violence and the military.

Professor Helen Parr is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Keele University. Her most recent work was a social and cultural history of the British Parachute Regiment and the 1982 Falklands War, Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper, which won the Templer Medal Book Prize, the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, the Longman-History Today Book Prize and was Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

Dr Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho is Reader in Brazilian and Latin American Studies in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He also served as a Vice Dean (International) for the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy, and Director of King’s Brazil Institute, between 2020 and 2022. He specialises in Latin American and Brazilian Armed Forces, with reference to historical and contemporary issues. In 2022, Vinicius created the Observatory of Democracy in Latin America (KODLA), and he is also an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Strategic Studies of the Brazilian Navy.

'Military families, political violence, and transitional justice in Argentina. Perpetrators within?' by Eleonora Natale