Many of the world’s democracies are relatively young, having only recently emerged from their grim pasts. From southern Europe to Latin America to Africa, dozens of countries have moved from dictatorship to elected civilian government over the past half century—but many of their political systems still carry the residue of their secret crimes and repressive histories. This Sunday, we’re featuring Tina Rosenberg’s 1995 essay on what new democracies do with their old dictators—and how a nation can deal with its history in ways that do not repeat it.

“Since the French Revolution,” Rosenberg wrote, “it has been clear that the choices new democracies make—whether and how to investigate tyranny’s legacy, try its leaders, purge its bureaucrats, or touch one of its gunmen—can set the course for a nascent democratic system.” These choices depend on a number of factors, including the type of dictatorial system that was in place, the crimes it committed, and the nation’s political culture and history. Truth commissions, for instance, “are especially necessary after dictatorships or wars marked by widespread torture and disappearance—crimes whose hideousness hinges in part on secrecy.” But the two main reasons for confronting the past remain the same: “to heal tyranny’s victims and to alter the conditions that nurtured dictatorship in order to prevent its return.”

Both the former military dictatorships of Latin America and the former communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe, for instance, faced this dilemma. Their pathologies were vastly different: in “Latin America the challenge to democracy comes from military dominance of a weak civilian government, while in Eastern Europe the danger is repression by capricious government officials unchecked by law.” But despite their dissimilarities, Rosenberg wrote, all new democracies had essentially the same task: “to go as far as they can to bring past repressors to accountability without crossing the line into new injustice.”