Assessing Post-Communist Experiences with Transitional Justice

Abstract

25 years of transitional justice in post-communist CEE have provided scholars with some portable information on the use, abuse, success and failure of the regional efforts of state and non-state actors to reckon with the recent past. The experiences in CEE with transitional justice are not only regionally proximate but also historically and culturally resonant with the post-Soviet states. This panel engages across the CEE and FSU experiences with transitional justice, reflecting on the success/failure of past programs as well as on-going efforts in the region to address legacies of the communist past. The panel explores files access and lustration measures in particular, and compares the conditions under which these measures have been used in support of democracy and societal reconciliation in several post-communist countries. The panel also engages with memory politics, in particular the way in which transitional justice measures like lustration revelations and file access can affect the reframing of the past and reverberate on politics of the present.

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