Legacies of Repression and Resistance in Early 20th Century Europe

Authoritarian and violent experiences affect the institutional settings of post-dictatorial regimes. However, we still lack a comprehensive knowledge on how local autocratic practices of violence, repression and control influence post-dictatorial subnational politics. This special issue aims to advance our understanding of the legacies of authoritarian political regimes. It focuses on the experience of several European countries before, during and immediately after WWII, a period of intense political turbulence in which citizens were subjected to both right- and left-wing dictatorships, where repression was often embedded in systems of governance. While many individuals collaborated with the repressive regimes, others resisted them, creating long-term variation in state-citizen relations across Europe. In this introduction, we review previous research on political legacies, present an analytical framework that distinguishes between two categories of legacies - congruence and alteration- and identify several types of legacies: persistency, discontinuity, creation, reactivation, transformation, substitution, and blunting.