Argentine Guest Researcher María Inés Tato at the University of Potsdam

Professor María Inés Tato, PhD, is a Principal Researcher of CONICET, based at the Institute of Argentine and Latin American History “Dr Emilio Ravignani” at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She coordinates that institute's Group of Historical War Studies (GEHiGue). Dr. Tato is also a Professor in the Master's program in War History at the Superior War College, Army Faculty, National Defense University (UNDEF). Her last book was “Falklands/Malvinas 1982. A War of Two Sides”, a rare collaboration between Argentine and British military historians on this sensitive topic, co-edited with Peter Stanley, Luis Esteban Dalla Fontana and Rob McLaughlin.

As part of her project on the social and cultural history of the First World War, during her stay in Potsdam Professor Tato will research the military and economic mobilization of the German community in Argentina and the German diplomats' and military's perceptions of Argentine neutrality. She will also contribute to a seminar on the history of violence in Latin America taught by the Chair of War Studies.

On July 4, 2025, Prof. Dr. María Inés Tato from the University of Buenos Aires gave an overview of the military historiography on the Falklands War, which is remembered in Argentina as the Guerra de Malvinas, as part of a public lecture. Overall, the historiography on the subject is characterized by a lack of communication between civilian and military authors in Argentina, with the former focusing on socio-cultural issues and the latter on operational and tactical ones. The significance of the conflict for Argentina as its only military conflict in the 20th century and a singular “expression of a national aspiration” is much greater than in Great Britain, where it is situated more within a longer tradition of colonial wars. The importance of memoirs and ego documents is comparable in both countries, but in Argentina – unlike in Great Britain – there is no “official history” of the war. Here, the military defeat led to widespread criticisms of the capabilities of the fighting troops (and not of the strategic decision to occupy the islands), a self-serving strategy to exonerate the military leadership, as well as to competing narratives of the individual branches of the armed forces to justify their own role in the conflict. It is clear, even forty years later, that this military conflict was of paramount importance for the national identity of the Argentines and, in the form of the ongoing veterans' issue, also for Argentinean politics.