The so-called “transition studies” were born after the collapse of authoritarian regimes in Southern Europe in the mid 1970s, and those of Latin America around a decade later. An extremely popular research subfield for a while, these studies attempted to codify and systematize the study of transitions to democracy, to analyze their qualitative features and propose models in relation to the criteria for determining what constituted democratization successes and failures. The collapse of the regimes of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 gave a push to this research agenda by offering “transitologists” an even wider range of case studies.

Although the cases of Greece and, above all, Spain were considered as “model” transitions, the simultaneous current economic crisis in both countries created a need to reassess post-authoritarian phenomena. The same applies to the countries of Eastern Europe but also Latin America. In moments of deep social, political and economic crisis, the recent past often becomes a central issue of contention. Additionally, the uprisings that shook Arab countries in 2011 revived some of the central questions of what constitutes a smooth passage to democratic rule after decades of authoritarianism, and whether the main actors that act as their engines are the masses or the elites.

These veritable paradigmatic turbulences prompted the Greek academic journal Historein, in collaboration with the Freie Universität Berlin, NYU’s Center for European and Mediterranean Studies and NYU Berlin to organize this two-day conference on the subject matter of Transitions Revisited. The conference is intended to be a follow-up to a three-day conference in Athens organized by Historein, the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, in December 2012, entitled “Metapolitefsi: From the Transition to Democracy to the Economic Crisis?” The follow-up seeks to link some of the conclusions of the Athens conference with a wider set of international case studies, thus expanding its chronotopical span.

The main objective of the conference is not solely the empirical documentation of transitions in such disparate contexts, but the opening up of a broader discussion on the nature of the latter. Which issues regarding the democratic transitions do we choose to remember, and which ones do we choose to forget on a meta-historical level and in terms of memory? How are these violent histories and the collective memory thereof framed and re-framed in times of crisis? Could the political lessons of the so-called “show-case models” of transition of Southern Europe, or the 1989 Central and Eastern European ones, be applied to the Arab countries at present? Or do democratization processes involve an element of “unrepeatability” that makes it impossible to extrapolate learning based on historical experience?

Perhaps some of the past conclusions of this field are by now obsolete and the time may be ripe to revisit them and introduce new terms, away from the normative drives of much of the early transitology.