Lustration, Transitional Justice, and Social Trust in Post-Communist Countries. Repairing or Wresting the Ties that Bind?

2014 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Communist Countries

Conclusion: Evaluating Post-Communist Transitional Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Truth Commissions ◽  
Trust Building ◽  
Policy Recommendations ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Public Disclosures ◽  
Communist Countries

Unlike the blanket criticisms or accolades transitional justice measures receive in the literature, we are confronted with the reality of divergent and contingent relationships between transitional justice measures like lustration, public disclosures, and truth commissions and political and social trust-building goals. These findings force us to reconsider policy recommendations associated with transitional justice programs both because of possibly contrary outcomes, and due to previously unconsidered temporal conditions. With respect to comparative democratization, this study demonstrated a potentially important democracy promotion effect from transitional justice measures meriting continued exploration. This retrospective of nearly twenty-five years of transitional justice in Central and Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union contributes to the growing body of knowledge on regional regime change, with special attention to how issues of complicity, trust building, and nostalgia constitute unique challenges faced by former communist countries.

Trust and Transitional Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Interpersonal Trust ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
Public Disclosure ◽  
Trust In Government ◽  
Change Characteristic ◽  
Communist Countries

Chapter 1 provides a literature review upon which to build the theoretical scaffolding of this book and explicates the development of the lustration typology. The chapter reviews the trust literature, highlighting differences in the origins and effects of trust in public institutions, trust in government, interpersonal trust, and trust in social institutions. Chapter 1 also reviews the literature on lustration and transitional justice, highlighting the design and use of measures in the post-communist region. From this literature, Chapter 1 develops a transitional justice typology consisting of four different categories of lustration and public disclosure programs based on the scope and implementation of programs and the degree of bureaucratic and symbolic change characteristic of the different programs. This typology is then used to categorize post-communist countries in Chapter 2.

Captured Commitments: An Analytic Narrative of Transitions with Transitional Justice

2010 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Nalepa
Keyword(s):  
Incomplete Information ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Analytic Narrative ◽  
Step Down ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Commitment Problems ◽  
Opposition Parties

How can outgoing autocrats enforce promises of amnesty once they have left power? Why would incoming opposition parties honor their prior promises of amnesty once they have assumed power and face no independent mechanisms of enforcement? In 1989 autocrats in a number of communist countries offered their respective oppositions free elections in exchange for promises of amnesty. The communists' decision appears irrational given the lack of institutions to enforce these promises of amnesty. What is further puzzling is that the former opposition parties that won elections in many countries actually refrained from implementing transitional justice measures. Their decision to honor their prior agreements to grant amnesty seems as irrational as the autocrats' decisions to place themselves at the mercy of their opponents. Using an analytic narrative approach, the author explains this paradox by modeling pacted transitions not as simple commitment problems but as games of incomplete information where the uninformed party has “skeletons in its closet”—that is, embarrassing information that provides insurance against the commitments being broken. The author identifies the conditions under which autocrats step down even though they can be punished with transitional justice and illustrates the results with case studies from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

Collaboration, Complicity, and Historical Memory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Secret Police ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
The Past ◽  
Shed Light

The widespread complicity evident in the post-communist cases complicates approaches to transitional justice because it lays some of the blame on society. Lustration procedures use information in secret police files to shed light on the past. Those files contain information documenting how neighbors, friends, co-workers, and even relatives might have informed on you. There is a potential for such revelations about the scope of the interpersonal and institutional betrayals to undermine social trust and civil society. This chapter explores the problems associated with complicity and transitional justice measures by examining the cases of Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Bulgaria. The cases highlight how historical memory is affected by negative revelations about the past. These cases illustrate how rising nostalgia can collide with truth telling, forcing the reconsideration and sometimes revision of historical memory.

scholarly journals Literature and lustration: Rebuilding social trust through literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
European Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Categorical Responses ◽  
To Come ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Legal Processes

How do nations, communities and individuals seek to restore individual meaning, social justice and social trust in the wake of traumatic histories? While international legal models have underpinned the processes of lustration in ex-communist countries, other forms of coming to terms with the past have contributed to the rebuilding of social trust in these environments. Literature has taken a role both in preparing the ground for more formal politico-legal processes, and in problematizing single-answer, simplistic or categorical responses to the complex issues of guilt, responsibility, complicity, victimhood and suffering in these societies. The significant new role that European literature has taken since the Holocaust is to come to terms with the past as a record not merely as a history, but as a responsibility and thereby to participate in the processes of lustration and rebuilding of civil society that have formed contemporary Europe.

scholarly journals From NGOs’ accountability to social trust. The evidence from CEE countries

2020 ◽  
Vol 109 (165) ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
Halina Waniak-Michalak ◽  
Ivana Perica ◽  
Sviesa Leitoniene
Keyword(s):  
Media Coverage ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Accounting Rules ◽  
Historical Heritage ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Selection Of

Purpose: The paper aims to find a link between the level of NGO accountability and the social trust for non-governmental organisations (NGOs). We will investigate if the accounting regulations and transpa-rency rules for NGOs in particular countries influence the social trust for NGOs. We will follow the process of the creation of accounting law for NGOs in three CEE countries: Lithuania – one of the Baltic states, which is in last place in the World Giving Index ranking, and Poland, and Croatia – the two best post-communist countries in the World Giving Index ranking. We will analyse the change in social trust in these countries in line with the development of legal and accounting rules and norms for NGOs. Methodology/approach: The design and methodology approach includes a literature review and compa-rative analysis. We supported our findings with panel regression analysis. Research limitations include the selection of only a few countries for the analysis and only nine years of observation per country. Findings: The results of our research indicate that accounting regulations are of marginal importance for social trust. We conclude that accountability alone does not solve the social trust problems faced by non- -profit organisations. Other factors affect social trust, such as lack of institutional mechanisms, lack of anempathic society, and negative media coverage. Originality/value: The originality and value of this paperlie in the fact that we explain how NGOs’ accountability and revenues influence social trust in NGOs.Furthermore, we refer to CEE countries where – due to their historical heritage – both social trust andtransparency were deeply affected.

scholarly journals The Institutional Settings of the Recovery of the NGO Sector in Post-Communist Countries

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
Halina Waniak-Michalak ◽  
Ivana Perica ◽  
Sviesa Leitoniene ◽  
Ewa Chojnacka
Keyword(s):  
Historical Data ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
Inductive Method ◽  
Communist Country ◽  
Institutional Settings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Accounting Rules ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Descriptive Method

The purpose of the paper is to describe the process of creating institutional settings in three post-communist countries and analyze the change of the social trust in these countries in line with the development of legal and accounting rules and norms for NGOs. The design and methodology include a literature analysis and the inductive method to analyze historical data for each country. The countries that were selected for the research are Lithuania – one of the Baltic states, which is in the last place in the World Giving Index (WGI) ranking, Poland with the average result in WGI ranking, and Croatia – the best post-communist country in the WGI ranking. Research limitations include the use of the descriptive method and the small number of countries included in the analysis. The originality and value of this paper lie in the fact that the problem of low social trust in NGOs in post-communist countries is analyzed by linking it with the development of NGO accountability and civil control over them.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia M. Horne
Keyword(s):  
Impact Assessment ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Social Trust ◽  
State Building ◽  
Trust Building ◽  
Theoretical Argument ◽  
Conditional Effects ◽  
The Impact

The Introduction reviews the basic relationships postulated between transitional justice measures and democratization, state building, and societal reconciliation, situating the post-communist experience within the larger comparative politics debates. The chapter presents a summary of the main theoretical argument, focusing on the differentiated and conditional effects of regional transitional justice measures on political and social trust building and democratization. The chapter explicates the use of mixed research methods employed in the project in order to demonstrate how the research design corrects for some of the current methodological limitations of the impact assessment literature to date. The chapter concludes with a preview of the main findings, and an overview of the structure of the project.

Coming to terms with the past. A framework for the study of justice in the transition to democracy

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Elster
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
Dependent Variables ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
Communist Countries ◽  
Latin American Countries ◽  
Political Decisions

After the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime, one commonly observes trials of the agents of the former regime and efforts to compensate its victims. In our century, waves of transitional justice have occured in German-occupied countries after 1941, in South- Eastern Europe in the 1970s, in Latin-American countries in the 1980s, and in post-Communist countries after 1989. The article proposes a framework for the behavioral study of these phenomena. The dependent variables are political decisions to pursue retroactive justice after the transition. Independent variables include the constraints of the actors, their motivations and beliefs, as well as the mechanisms by which individual policy preferences are aggregated into binding collective decisions.

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