Abstract

In this article, I aim to deploy a narrative of the Chilean move forward to democracy from Pinochet’s dictatorship (‘the transition’), upon the understanding of democracy as an ever-unfinished project. I use a theoretical- historical approach to merge a broad range of analyses made from the 1988 referendum onwards, setting three axis where the changing conditions of the debate about transitions were discussed: ‘origin’, ‘interpretation’, and “debt”. The conclusion is that the studies on transitions provided analytical and conceptual tools that far exceeded their use in the original transitional moment. In fact, these studies contribute to the analysis of the contemporary conflict and the evaluation of current democracy.