Whereas all the post-1945 regime changes were caused by the defeat of Germany, the transitions that triggered reparation and restitution in the 1980s and 1990s did not have an obvious common cause. One might argue, perhaps, that a democratic Zeitgeist was the common factor underlying the fall of authoritarian or totalitarian regimes in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and South Africa, but no one has provided an explicit causal mechanism linking this supposed spirit to specific events. Although nobody likes to be an international pariah, the case of Myanmar is an example (among many others) that this discomfort is more easily tolerated than loss of power and the prospect of punishment. The causes of transition are more plausibly sought in specific national issues: a military defeat in Argentina, an economic crisis in Poland, a perception that the USSR would not intervene to uphold them in other East European countries, and the increasing bite of economic sanctions in South Africa. Why the Chilean junta abdicated from power when they could easily have held on to it is harder to understand. Perhaps Pinochet, as the Polish Communists did in 1989, miscalculated the level of support he would receive in the first presidential elections.

The dominant common factor in these transitions is that the outgoing elite managed to obtain considerable legal or de facto immunity from prosecution. In Latin America and South Africa, they achieved this goal through their military and economic power.