Building Trust and Democracy: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Countries
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| Anteprima |
This
volume explores the effects of transitional justice measures on
trust-building and democratization across twelve countries in Central
and Eastern Europe and parts of the Former Soviet Union over the period
19892012. The author argues that transitional justice measures have a
differentiated impact on political and social trust-building, supporting
some aspects of political trust and undermining other aspects of social
trust. Moreover, the structure, scope, timing, and implementation of
transitional justice measures condition outcomes. More expansive and
compulsory institutional change mechanisms register the largest effects,
with limited and voluntary change mechanisms having a diminished
effect, and more informal and largely symbolic measures having the most
attenuated effect. These differentiated and conditional effects are also
evident with respect to transition goals like supporting democratic
consolidation and reducing corruption, since these goals respond
differently to the mixtures of institutional and symbolic reforms found
in transitional justice programs. The author develops an original
transitional justice typology in order to test hypotheses linking
trust-building and transitional justice across twelve cases in the
post-communist region. The resulting new datasets allow for a
quantitative examination of the relationship between different types of
transitional justice programs and a range of possible state building and
societal reconciliation goals, including political trust-building,
social trust-building, democratization, the strengthening of civil
society, the promotion of government effectiveness, and the reduction of
corruption. Comparative case studies of four transitional justice
programs-Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Bulgariadraw on field work,
primary and historical documents, and interview materials to explicate
trust-building dynamics, with particular attention to regime complicity
challenges, historical memory issues, and communist legacies. Oxford
Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of
comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the
comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the
decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the
series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern
Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor
is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College,
University of Oxford.
