Which Past Matters?: Transitional Justice for Competing Pasts in the Balkans and the Baltics

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

During the past 35 years a wealth of literature has discussed ways in which post-communist countries have redressed the legacies of the recent past through transitional justice, almost ignoring the fact that many of these new democracies had to reckon with not one but multiple pasts. The assumption that governments redressed the most gruesome or the most proximate past was not always borne out in reality. These pasts could be different or similar in the nature of state-led repression, the levels of resistance and collaboration of the society with the regime, the categories of victims and victimizers, or the number of crimes and human rights abuses perpetrated. They were “competing and layered” pasts because they often competed for the attention of government and civil society actors and had cumulative effects on democratization that continue to remain understudied to date. Based on examples drawn from Albania, Croatia, Romania, Latvia and Lithuania, this roundtable shows that Nazism, communism and even more distant pasts have become grounds for contestation and negotiation for civil society and government officials seeking to address the “politics of the present.” This roundtable discusses the results of a project that examines the way in which transitional justice for different pasts interact with, facilitate and sometimes block each other.

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Lavinia Stan, St Francis Xavier U (Canada)

Roundtable Members

• Dovile Budryte, Georgia Gwinnett College / Vytautas Magnus / Vilnius U (Lithuania)

• Robert Clegg Austin, U of Toronto (Canada)

• Heike Karge, Karl-Franzens-U of Graz (Austria)

• Cynthia Michalski Horne, Western Washington U

Session Manager

• Aliide Naylor, Independent Scholar