Under Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976-83, tens of thousands of Argentine citizens disappeared - having been abducted, tortured, and finally murdered by their own government.

This book is the most comprehensive treatment of the emergence, successes, and failures of the Argentine human rights movement - the only force that resisted the unspeakable atrocities of state terror. At the risk of their lives, grieving mothers and grandmothers, civil libertarians, and religious figures used a unique combination of symbolic protest, information gathering, and international pressure to demand accountability from the state and to defend the victims of repression.

The movement played a key role in Argentina's 1983 transition to democracy. Under democracy, the movement continued to work for accountability for past human rights violations through a presidential investigatory commission, criminal trials of former military rulers, and the tracing of "missing" children who had been illegally adopted. The author also analyzes the role of the human rights movement in a range of Alfonsin-era legal and social reforms.

Why was a group of relatively powerless ordinary citizens able to successfully resist and challenge a brutal, authoritarian state? How could a social movement catalyze and shape democratization? Moving beyond the case study, the book extends the theoretical "new social movement" perspective to a theory of symbolic politics in which changes in agenda and challenges to legitimacy transformed both state and society.

This approach explains why the very strategies that enabled the Argentine human rights movement to survive dictatorship and to catalyze sweeping reforms have limited the movement's ability to truly institutionalize human rights in today's Argentina.