The Új Symposion Journal on Trial in Yugoslavia (1971/72)

Among the censored press and criminal prosecutions led against individuals after the 1968 student demonstrations in socialist Yugoslavia, a Hungarian neo-avantgarde journal published in Novi Sad found its own place. The Új Symposion journal’s two issues were banned at the end of 1971, and a few months later, its two authors and editor were criminally prosecuted. The aim of this article is to explore the occurrence of political trials in Yugoslavia on the example of the Új Symposion case, by looking into the trial documents, as well as the testimonies of three witnesses of this historical event.

Adam Naruszewiczs Oda do sprawiedliwości im Kontext des politischen Denkens und der Gelegenheitsdichtung der Aufklärung

Summary The article discusses Adam Naruszewicz‘s famous Ode to Justice (1773) and the engagement of occasional poetry in contemporary discussions about the handling of justice in political trials. Looking at the trial of 1773 the Ode addresses the question of finding a just sentence for the abortive attempt two years earlier to abduct king Stanisław August. The article presents the pertinent aspects for such an analysis in three parts: 1) an introduction to the conceptualization of royal justice in European thought of the Enlightenment, 2) the known facts about the abduction and its historical contexts, 3) an overview of the occasional poetry written by Naruszewicz about the incident from 1771 to 1773 leading to an analysis of the Ode to Justice in regard to the political reasoning of its author.

Political Trials of the Second Half of the 1930s in the Mirror of the Regional Press

The article reveals the reaction of the regional press, and in particular, on the Mordovian regional Committee of the CPSU(b) of the newspaper “Red Mordovia” in the political trials of 1937 in Moscow, and the establishment of Soviet society a climate of suspicion, “hostile environment”, the search for “enemies of the people”, “wreckers”, “spies”, “Trotskyites”, spies of Western and Japanese intelligence agencies.

The Politics of Building Civic Tech

This chapter evaluates the technical and political trials involved in building a suite of open data tools by charting the development of the Dublin Dashboard. Building a city dashboard is a good way to gain an in-depth knowledge of how civic tech can be created using open data, and the politics and praxes involved. Like the process for creating the original city dashboard, the redevelopment of the Dublin Dashboard and production of the Cork Dashboard involved a significant amount of planning, negotiation, and trial and error. Just as these processes and institutional landscape have an effect on how a dashboard is created, the collective manufacture of dashboards reshapes institutions and their practices. How we design dashboards, and what data are included and how they are displayed, influences what knowledge is learned and how it is applied. Importantly, given that dashboards are a key means by which operators monitor urban infrastructure within control rooms, this mutability directly shapes the nature of data driven urbanism and how our cities are managed and run.

Democratic backsliding and the media: the convergence of news narratives in Turkey

This article presents how the rise of Justice and Development Party (AKP) to political power in Turkey transformed journalists’ professional practices as to lead to a decline in the plurality of opinions presented in the media. After AKP’s second electoral victory in 2007, political trials, property transfers, and dismissals wrapped in a discourse of punishment and purge of the “nation’s enemies” destabilized long established power hierarchies of secularists, religious-conservatives, Kurds, and leftists in Turkey. The destabilization was caused by the state’s changing attitude toward these identity groups, and in the media it lead to shifts in journalists’ status positions and emotions. Varying professional responses triggered by these shifts explain the convergence to a dominant singular political narrative in the media. This argument builds on narrative evidence collected between 2012 and 2014 via in-depth interviews, newspaper articles, and journalists’ memoires. With a from-below account, the article presents the effects of destabilized hierarchies on journalistic practice. In the example of media, it invites scholars to rethink contemporary democratic backsliding in terms of the links between state actors and non-state actors, on the one hand, and social actors’ power positions, political identities, and professional practices, on the other.

On the History of the Academic Series “Literary Heritage” (for the 90th Anniversary)

The article examines the history of the publication of the academic series Literary Heritage based on new archival materials. The publication was initiated in 1931, when archival and publishing activities were affected by political trials. The author of the draft used political rhetoric to get permission to publish it from the Central Committee of the CPSU(b). In 1932, following the decree “On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations,” Literary Heritage became an exemplary academic publication and received international recognition. Literary Heritage developed a new method as it placed the author in the position of a student at the editorial board. In Soviet times, the Literary Heritage existed under the conditions of censorship and ideological control but still managed to publish a volume on Russian symbolism in 1937. The years 1947–1959 were difficult for Literary Heritage when the editorial office was accused of cosmopolitanism. In its publishing policy, Literary Heritage was ahead of time and above the reader’s dogmatism which led to the sequestration of several volumes. The history of Literary Heritage contributed to creating an intellectual and ideological platform that nurtured a new generation of literary historians.

The Persistence of Chinese Rights Defenders

Scholars have recently critiqued human rights as a purely Eurocentric construct that has failed to find wider appeal and is now on the decline. Some cite the apparent success of China’s repressive political regime in support of this argument, but depicting China as uniformly authoritarian risks missing the persistence of domestic forms of human rights advocacy and mobilization. This chapter reviews the history of civil society mobilization in China since 2000, including actions taken in domestic courts, in non-governmental organizations, and through social media. Despite repeated crackdowns, the arrest and disappearance of leading human rights defenders, and Chinese authorities’ interference with UN human rights mechanisms, some Chinese human rights defenders do find innovative ways to persist in rights-based advocacy, such as the practice of weiguan (public counterveillance during political trials). The author argues that the world has entered a more intense phase of struggle over the meaning and application of human rights norms in diverse local contexts, and that the human rights framework facilitates transnational solidarity.

Professionalizing a Political Trial

This chapter highlights the ways in which the Extraordinary African Chambers (EAC) clerking experience compared to that of other Senegalese courts. In any trial, the clerk is a critical link as the guarantor of the proceedings. The EAC, under Senegalese jurisdiction, had qualified clerks to accompany the Administration, the different courts, and the Prosecutor's Office in the preparation, investigation, and judgment of the Hissène Habré case. It should be noted that the Habré trial, which was a first for Senegal, was almost a leap in the dark for clerks as they had had no experience with or training on the international courts which usually dealt with the types of crimes being brought before the African Chambers. The clerks nonetheless executed their work quite satisfactorily at the various posts to which they were assigned. Ultimately, the Habré trial was a rich experience in all manner of ways. On a professional level, it allowed some of the clerks to complete or participate in procedures that they had previously known only in theory. The trial is of immense pedagogical interest as it was the first time that a former president was tried on African soil. The chapter then considers the professionalization of political trials in Africa.

The Embassy Trial

Chapter 5 discusses the ‘Embassy trial’ of 343 BC, where we have extant speech texts by Demosthenes (On the False Embassy) and Aeschines (On the Embassy), prosecutor and defendant respectively. It shows how each orator crafts his historical material to respond at the level of technique and/or content to his opponent’s figurations of the past at the previous stage of the encounter. Chapter 5.1 offers an introduction and overview which assesses the character of the speech texts we possess and exposes problems with the conventional view of the duration of major Athenian political trials. Chapter 5.2 explores how Demosthenes’ On the False Embassy capitalizes on a climate unfavourable to the Peace made with Philip of Macedon in 346 to make the right, responsible use of the past a critical stake in the dispute, demolishing a key illustration involving Solon that Aeschines had fashioned in the trial of Timarchus and setting up a long-range comparison between Aeschines and the 360s envoy Timagoras. Chapter 5.3 shows how Demosthenes’ decision to dwell on the terms of the Timarchus trial and to adopt an uncritically broad—and predictably inclusive—approach to the past (and one geared partly towards reinventing himself as an opponent of the Peace) left him vulnerable to a deft, multiform defence strategy from Aeschines which involved careful projection of his own discernment in the use of history along with the creation of lively and overtly continuum-based scenarios of a type probably more immediately associable with Demosthenes. Chapter 5.4 offers a conclusion.