Transitional Justice and the Former Soviet Union

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

While much scholarly attention has been paid to transitional justice measures in Central and Eastern Europe, the experiences in the Former Soviet Union have received less attention. The FSU countries are important both for the measures they adopted as well as the measures they rejected. The FSU cases provide a set of comparative cases with built in controls (post-authoritarian transitions at same moment in time, post-communist historical legacies) and with significant variation (size, scope, implementation of measures, domestic political contexts). Combined, these factors allow us to explore possible lessons about the use or abuse of transitional justice in the post-communist region. Additionally, the 25 years of transitional justice in the post-communist space in CEE have included a variety of methods used with greater and lesser success. The CEE experiences with lustration policies, trials, truth commissions, memorialization, and file access could be compared to the FSU experience, as both speak to specific post-communist transitional justice needs. Therefore this roundtable aims to consider the use or rejection of transitional justice both within the former FSU and between the FSU and CEE spaces, in order to engage a discussion of post-communist transitional justice in comparative perspective. Stan will review what we know to date about transitional justice efforts across the FSU region, Wezel and Budryte will specifically engage the Baltic region's efforts to address the communist past with particular attention to truth commissions, files, and memorialization, and Horne and David will address lustration and vetting efforts.

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Monica Ciobanu, SUNY Plattsburgh

Roundtable Members

• Dovile Budryte, Georgia Gwinnett College

• Roman David, Lingnan U (Hong Kong)

• Cynthia Michalski Horne, Western Washington U

• Katja Wezel, U of Pittsburgh