Post-Communist Transitional Justice: Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience

Taking stock of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, this volume explores the ways these societies have grappled with the serious human rights violations of past regimes. It focuses on the most important factors that have shaped the nature, speed, and sequence of transitional justice programs in the period spanning the tumultuous revolutions that brought about the collapse of the communist dictatorships and the consolidation of new democratic regimes. Contributors explain why leaders made certain choices, discuss the challenges they faced, and explore the role of under-studied actors and grassroots strategies. Written by recognized experts with an unparalleled grasp of the region's communist and post-communist reality, this volume addresses far-reaching reckoning, redress, and retribution policy choices. It is an engaging and carefully crafted volume, and it covers a wide variety of cases and discusses key transitional justice theories using both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Lavinia Stan is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at St Francis Xavier University, Canada. She is an associate editor of the peer-reviewed Women's Studies International Forum and, most recently, the co-author or co-editor of Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Romania (2013); Church, State and Democracy in the Expanding Europe (with Lucian Turcescu, 2011); and the three-volume Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice (with Nadya Nedelsky, 2013). Stan is also the author of more than fifty peer-reviewed articles published in the European Political Science Journal, Problems of Post-Communism, Communist and Post-Communist Politics, and Europe-Asia Studies.

Nadya Nedelsky is Associate Professor of International Studies at Macalester College. She is the author of Defining the Sovereign Community: National Identity, Individual Rights, and Minority Membership in the Czech and Slovak Republics (2009) and the co-editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice (with Lavinia Stan, 2013). She is author of the national report on the Czech and Slovak republics titled How the Memory of Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes in Europe is Dealt with in the Member States commissioned by the European Commission Directorate General of Justice, Freedom and Security.