Post-Communist Transitional Justice: Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience

Taking stock of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, this volume explores how these societies have grappled with the serious human rights violations of past regimes. It focuses on the most important factors that have shaped the nature, speed, and sequence of transitional justice programs in the period spanning the revolutions that brought about the collapse of the communist dictatorships and the consolidation of new democratic regimes. Contributors explain why leaders made certain choices, discuss the challenges they faced, and explore the role of under-studied actors and grassroots strategies. Written by recognized experts with an unparalleled grasp of the region's communist and post-communist reality, this volume addresses far-reaching reckoning, redress, and retribution policy choices. It is an engaging, carefully crafted volume, which covers a wide variety of cases and discusses key transitional justice theories using both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Table of Contents:
Part I. Determinants of Transitional Justice: 1. Transitional justice and political goods Brian Grodsky; 2. Transitional justice as electoral politics Robert Austin; 3. Explaining late lustration programs: lessons from the Polish case Aleks Szczerbiak; Part II. The Impact of Transitional Justice: 4. The adoption and impact of transitional justice Moira Lynch and Bridget Marchesi; 5. Transitional justice effects in the Czech Republic Roman David; Part III. Key Challenges: 6. The timing of transitional justice measures Cynthia M. Horne; 7. The challenge of competing pasts Monica Ciobanu; 8. Beyond the national: pathways of diffusion Helga A. Welsh; 9. The mythologizing of communist violence Jelena Subotic; Part IV. History, Justice, and Public Memory: 10. Post-communist truth commissions: between transitional justice and the politics of history Andrew Beattie; 11. Public memory, commemoration, and transitional justice: reconfiguring the past in public space Duncan Light and Craig Young; 12. Stories we tell: documentary theater, performance, and justice in transition Olivera Simic; 13. Vigilante justice and unofficial truth projects Lavinia Stan.

About the Author :
Lavinia Stan is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at St Francis Xavier University, Canada. She is an associate editor of the peer-reviewed Women's Studies International Forum and, most recently, the co-author or co-editor of Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania (2013); Church, State and Democracy in the Expanding Europe (with Lucian Turcescu, 2011); and the three-volume Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice (with Nadya Nedelsky, 2013). Stan is also the author of more than fifty peer-reviewed articles published in the European Political Science Journal, Problems of Post-Communism, Communist and Post-Communist Politics, and Europe-Asia Studies. Nadya Nedelsky is Associate Professor of International Studies at Macalester College. She is the author of Defining the Sovereign Community: National Identity, Individual Rights, and Minority Membership in the Czech and Slovak Republics (2009) and the co-editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice (with Lavinia Stan, 2013). She is author of the national report on the Czech and Slovak republics titled How the Memory of Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes in Europe is Dealt with in the Member States commissioned by the European Commission Directorate General of Justice, Freedom and Security.

Review :
'This volume succeeds in presenting a coherent and nuanced account of the post-1989 experience of CEE with dealing with the past. It speaks of several commonalities with regard to not only political manipulations of truth and memory, the abuses and misuses of transitional justice for scapegoating or political legitimacy, the role of liminality and transcendence, but also of the trade-off between truth and democratic development. It convincingly shows that transitional justice in CEE is much broader than the topic of lustration and offers numeric shades of grey to each of the attempted policies of reckoning.' Jessie Hronesova, Nationalities Papers 'I believe that Stan and Nedelsky's ambitious and systematic book is bound to become a work of reference for scholars of transitional justice and area studies, and for political theorists alike. Since the volume forwards the understanding of transitional justice in several different ways, it is also not difficult to see it included in reading lists for advanced seminars or lectures in transitional justice or political theory.' Liviu Damsa, Europe-Asia Studies