This paper will bring together educational research on citizenship education policies and practices in post-authoritarian and post-socialist contexts to explore how possible, effective and productive can a comparative perspective be in detecting different relevant dimensions which would be missed both experiences were not considered. Departing from the instrument by Tatiana Zimenkova, developed to look at post-socialist education (and presented in a connected paper) the author will reflect on how a common methodological perspective can be fruitful in furthering an understanding of how, in a post-authoritarian context, the syllabuses, the schools, and the teachers deal with the tensions of memory and false-memory, of pacification and conflict and of neutralization and politicization. Data will be drawn primarily from the findings of a project on how citizenship education in Portugal and Spain in how it dealt with their authoritarian pasts (Ferreira et al. 2013), EDUCIPART (a project involving a team of researchers from CIIE - University of Porto) which included the analysis of history textbooks and interviews with specialists in contemporary history and education from both countries.