Abstract:The military rule in Brazil between 1964 and 1985 employed less violence than similar authoritarian regimes in neighbouring countries, and attempted to maintain a façade of legitimacy by allowing for a consented opposition. Nevertheless, Brazil was the last Latin American nation to establish a truth commission. Ever since the Amnesty Law was passed in 1979, authorities and citizens have both struggled to come to terms with the human rights violations committed in the past. The Brazilian government went as far as offering material reparations to the presumed victims without disclosing official information to establish what the reparations were being paid for. Is it better to remember or forget? This Exploration discusses transitional justice strategies, and documents recent developments in Brazil's political history. Keywords: Brazil, transitional justice, historical memory, truth commission, state terrorism.Resumen: Entre la verdad y la amnesia. Terrorismo de Estado, violaciones de derechos humanos y justicia transicional en BrasilEntre 1964 y 1985, el régimen militar en Brasil empleó menos violencia que regímenes autoritarios de países vecinos, e intentó mantener una fachada de legitimidad. Sin embargo, Brasil fue el último país latinoamericano en establecer una comisión de la verdad. Desde la aprobación de la Ley de Amnistía en 1979, tanto las autoridades como los ciudadanos luchan para hacer justicia a las violaciones de derechos humanos cometidas en el pasado. El gobierno brasileño llegó al extremo de ofrecer reparaciones materiales a las presuntas vícti-mas, sin revelar informaciones oficiales para establecer por qué las estaba pagando. ¿Es mejor recordar u olvidar? Esta Exploración analiza las estrategias de justicia transicional y documenta evoluciones recientes en la política histórica brasileña. Palabras clave: Brasil, justicia transicional, memoria histórica, comisión de la verdad, terrorismo de Estado.

Can International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending improve natural resource governance in borrowing countries? While most IMF agreements mandate policy reforms in exchange for financial support, compliance with these reforms is mixed at best. The natural resource sector should be no exception. After all, resource windfalls enable short‐term increases in discretionary spending, and office‐seeking politicians are often unwilling to forgo this discretion by reforming the oil, gas, or mining sector. I investigate how and when borrowers go against their political interests and establish natural resource funds—a tool often promoted by the IMF—in the wake of a loan agreement. Using text analysis, statistical models, and qualitative evidence from natural resource policy and IMF conditionality for 74 countries between 1980 and 2019, I show that borrowers under an IMF agreement are more likely to create or regulate a resource fund, particularly if the agreement includes binding conditions that highlight the salience of natural resource reforms. This study contributes to extant research by proposing a new method to extract information from IMF conditions, by introducing a novel dataset on country‐level natural resource policy, and by identifying under what circumstances international reform efforts can help combat the resource curse.

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Macroeconomic variables like unemployment, inflation, trade, or GDP are not set in stone: they are preliminary estimates that are constantly revised by statistical agencies. These data revisions, or data vintages, often provide conflicting information about the size of a country’s economy or its level of development, reducing our confidence in established findings. Would researchers come to different conclusions if they used different vintages? To answer this question, I survey all articles published in a top political science journal between 2005 and 2020. I replicate three prominent articles and find that the use of different vintages can lead to different statistical results, calling into question the robustness of otherwise rigorous empirical research. These findings have two practical implications. First, researchers should always be transparent about their data sources and vintages. Second, researchers should be more modest about the precision and accuracy of their point estimates, since these estimates can mask large measurement errors.