scholarly journals Delegitimizing the Communist Past and Building a New Sense of Community: The Politics of Transitional Justice and Memory in Ukraine

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 372-405
Author(s):  
Oksana Myshlovska
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Sense Of Community ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Historical Justice ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Way

This article studies the way in which the crimes of the communist regime have been dealt with since the late Soviet period, and the way the legacies of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) have been subject to reevaluation. During the Soviet period, policies such as the rehabilitation of victims of mass repression were initiated from above, while the documentation of human rights violations and revelations of mass repressions and death by hunger were undertaken by the dissident movement from below. Since the late perestroika period, the focus on the crimes of the communist regime has been used by the opposition in Ukraine in the struggle for the restitution of group rights. Affirmative action concerning the Ukrainian language, culture and history was seen as the restoration of historical justice. This resulted most recently in the adoption of so-called ‘decommunization’ laws, which has been a controversial and contested issue in Ukraine. The article discusses the factors that shaped the way Ukraine has handled the communist past and constructed new narratives, and reflects on the reason why a ‘politics of regret’ has not resonated yet with political actors involved in the state legitimization struggle.

Of Old Men, Country Clubs, and Atrocities: The Visualities and Externalities of Detaining Elderly Human Rights Violators in Chile

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Caroline Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Negative Externality ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Penal Reform ◽  
Country Club ◽  
Justice Process ◽  
Human Rights Norms ◽  
Old Men ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article explores a pair of powerful but competing symbols in the Chilean human transitional justice process: ‘pobres viejitos’ (poor little old men) and country club prisons. The symbol of the ‘pobres viejitos’ is used very effectively by conservative elements of Chilean society to argue the futility or even inhumanity of punishing perpetrators of human right violations so long after the commission of their crimes. In turn, to victims and more liberal segments of society, the country club or ‘five star’ prison for human rights violators stands as a symbol of impunity and the failure of the Chilean state to do justice for the crimes of the dictatorship. This article examines the power of these symbols in undermining support for transitional justice efforts, as well as the externalities of the debate. The fate of the ‘pobres viejitos’ and whether to release the from even their relatively comfortable places of confinement has bled into debates on penal reform for other elderly prisoners. This mostly negative externality suggests the need for international and regional courts (or countries not in the throes of transitional justice processes, particularly delayed ones) to lead the way on the articulation of human rights norms related to the trial and punishment of elderly prisoners.

scholarly journals “Death Does Not Rot”: Transitional Justice and Local “Truths” in the Aftermath of the War in Northern Uganda

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Barbara Meier
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
International Agencies ◽  
Local Justice ◽  
Peace And Justice ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
Major Argument ◽  
Peace And War ◽  
The Way

The article looks at the way Acholi in northern Uganda address war-related matters of “peace” and “justice” beyond the mainstream human rights discourse reflecting some of the basic concepts that are decisive for the way people deal with transitional and local justice. The relationality and the segmentary structure of Acholi society play major roles in categorising “peace” and “war” while being at odds with the globalised standards of human rights that have been brought into play by international agencies, civil society and church organisations as well as the Ugandan state. A major argument is that a one-dimensional understanding of the cosmological underpinnings of rituals as a locally embedded tool of transitional justice (TJ) has an impact on the failure of TJ in northern Uganda. Thus the article highlights the specific cultural dilemmas in which the process of peace currently appears to be stuck.

Post-Communist Transitional Justice in Albania

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Austin ◽  
Jonathan Ellison
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Justice Process ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Political Scene

The article provides a detailed and informative account of the transitional justice process in Albania and examines the logic behind the initiation of lustration process. Describing the accurate historical context of the country's communist past, the authors explain the factors that prevented the successful implementation of the post-communist transitional justice in Albania, such as its political culture, the impact of the communist regime, and most importantly, the lack of political will from Albanian political leadership to break away from its communist past. A pioneer in initiating transitional justice laws in the Balkans in the early nineties, Albania failed to successfully implement them, as the leadership saw the lustration process as a political means to crush the opposition and consolidate its power. The article explains that transitional justice process in Albania became highly politicized and was used by politicians for political gains, which ultimately led to loss of trust from general public failing to detach the Albanian political scene from its communist past.

scholarly journals The Communist past of Albania and the Country in 25 Years of Transition

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 110
Author(s):  
Bledar Abdurrahmani
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Public Property ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Fundamental Freedoms ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
Political Economic

Already quarter of a decade after the fall of communism in Albania, the country continues to struggle with an undergoing profound political, economic, social and legal transition period. This long transition challenges the constitutional aspiration of the Albanian people to build a democratic state that is founded on the protection and guarantee of human rights and fundamental freedoms, on building a future of social peace and economic prosperity. Despite a large corpus of constitutional and legal measures undertaken during the transition years to build a state of law based on freedom and human rights, the initiative of the free market, private and public property, they have failed to address adequately the demand for respect of human rights and fundamental freedoms of a category of subjects that during communism suffered the profound violation of these rights, were victims of vicious inhuman acts and unable to benefit from repair as much as possible of the consequences of these violations.This paper aims to make a thorough analysis of the concept of transitional justice, the legal instruments of international law used to address the obligation of ex communist states to take measures for the eradication of the communist past, as a prerequisite for building a functional democracy founded upon social peace and prosperity. The essence of this paper lies in assessing how these instruments are reflected in domestic legislation, the stage they are and the effects they have brought about. The focus of this paper are the factors that have conditioned the separation of Albania from its communist past and the steps needed to be undertaken.

scholarly journals Museums and Transitional Justice: Assessing the Impact of a Memorial Museum on Young People in Post-Communist Romania

Societies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Duncan Light ◽  
Remus Creţan ◽  
Andreea-Mihaela Dunca
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Young People ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Memorial Museums ◽  
Memorial Museum ◽  
Communist Past ◽  
The Impact

Memorial museums are frequently established within transitional justice projects intended to reckon with recent political violence. They play an important role in enabling young people to understand and remember a period of human rights abuses of which they have no direct experience. This paper examines the impact of a memorial museum in Romania which interprets the human rights abuses of the communist period (1947–1989). It uses focus groups with 61 young adults and compares the responses of visitors and non-visitors to assess the impact of the museum on views about the communist past, as well as the role of the museum within post-communist transitional justice. The museum had a limited impact on changing overall perceptions of the communist era but visiting did stimulate reflection on the differences between past and present, and the importance of long-term remembrance; however, these young people were largely skeptical about the museum’s role within broader processes of transitional justice. The paper concludes that it is important to recognize the limits of what memorial museums can achieve, since young people form a range of intergenerational memories about the recent past which a museum is not always able to change.

scholarly journals Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946–2016)

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve Bates ◽  
Ipek Cinar ◽  
Monika Nalepa
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Granular Structure ◽  
New Democracies ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Adequate Data ◽  
The Way

In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project.

On Violations of Human Rights by the Communist Regime in Poland

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (40) ◽  
pp. 224-262
Author(s):  
Bo Robertson (Bożysława Maria-Magdalena Nadolna)
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
The Core ◽  
Shame And Guilt ◽  
Individual Justice ◽  
The Way

During the communist regime, the Polish judicial apparatus was construed as a tool to liquidate the opposition. Many people were killed, imprisoned, tortured, dispossessed, and their families persecuted and condemned to lives of abject poverty. After the fall of communism, the perpetrators of these atrocities were not confronted with their crimes and continued to function surreptitiously. Their shame and guilt have been suppressed, while the wrongs suffered by the victims have not been remedied, and thus continue to hang over the nation like the Sword of Damocles. The unexpunged culpability and corrupted conscience inherited by their descendants continue to foment social resentments. The aim of the article is to suggest the approach to restoring social equilibrium taking as the premise that the legacy of historical violence must be remedied, and the wrongs must be rectified a priori. The scientific methods used in the article are restitution, restoration, reconciliation, and mediation. The sense of social and individual justice is at the core of humanity. Where this is lacking, social unrest arises and spills over with violence. The crimes of the communist regime must be conceded to prevent an impending revolution. Compassion toward the suffering can pave the way to forgiveness, and through that, to reconciliation.

scholarly journals Introduction

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Briony Jones ◽  
Thomas Brudholm
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
National Unity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Critical Turn ◽  
Past Wrongs ◽  
The Way

Transitional justice, as a process and set of mechanisms designed to address human rights violations of the past, is a project of transformation. Designed to deal with legacies of past wrongs, transitional justice ideally aims to address their root causes, to adjudicate social and institutional responsibilities, to transform the institutional contexts and power relations that enabled human rights violations to take place, to restore, repair, or facilitate new relationships and to promote national unity and reconciliation. Now an established policy response to the end of civil war, authoritarian regimes or occupation, transitional justice has been the focus of scholarly attention for long enough to have warranted a critical turn, both in terms of the way transitional justice is theorized (Corradetti, Eisikovits, and Rotondi 2015; Hirsch 2012) and the way in which it is implemented and experienced in practice. Examples of such critiques include accusations of imposition of western norms that are not culturally meaningful in some contexts, of the dominance of legal approaches to justice at the expense of the restorative and symbolic, of its instrumentalization by the powerful for the consolidation of authority or privilege, and of limited evidence that it actually has a positive impact on justice and peace (see, e.g., Iliff 2012; Leebaw 2008; Pouligny 2005).

Deconstructing Turkey’s “Open Door” Policy towards Refugees from Syria

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burcu Togral Koca
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Open Door ◽  
Open Door Policy ◽  
Security Framework ◽  
Liberal Policy ◽  
The Way

Turkey has followed an “open door” policy towards refugees from Syria since the March 2011 outbreak of the devastating civil war in Syria. This “liberal” policy has been accompanied by a “humanitarian discourse” regarding the admission and accommodation of the refugees. In such a context, it is widely claimed that Turkey has not adopted a securitization strategy in its dealings with the refugees. However, this article argues that the stated “open door” approach and its limitations have gone largely unexamined. The assertion is, here, refugees fleeing Syria have been integrated into a security framework embedding exclusionary, militarized and technologized border practices. Drawing on the critical border studies, the article deconstructs these practices and the way they are violating the principle of non-refoulement in particular and human rights of refugees in general. 

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document