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"Transitional justice Romania."
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Museums and Transitional Justice: Assessing the Impact of a Memorial Museum on Young People in Post-Communist Romania
Memorial museums are frequently established within transitional justice projects intended to reckon with recent political violence. They play an important role in enabling young people to understand and remember a period of human rights abuses of which they have no direct experience. This paper examines the impact of a memorial museum in Romania which interprets the human rights abuses of the communist period (1947–1989). It uses focus groups with 61 young adults and compares the responses of visitors and non-visitors to assess the impact of the museum on views about the communist past, as well as the role of the museum within post-communist transitional justice. The museum had a limited impact on changing overall perceptions of the communist era but visiting did stimulate reflection on the differences between past and present, and the importance of long-term remembrance; however, these young people were largely skeptical about the museum’s role within broader processes of transitional justice. The paper concludes that it is important to recognize the limits of what memorial museums can achieve, since young people form a range of intergenerational memories about the recent past which a museum is not always able to change.
Journal Article
Transitional justice and democratic consolidation in post-communist Eastern Europe: Romania and Albania
While there are many studies on the democratization trajectory of former communist countries of Eastern Europe, only a few of them have a particular focus on how transitional justice helps democratic consolidation. The present comparative study seeks to fill that gap by focusing specifically on the cases of Romania and Albania, situating them in the wider kaleidoscope of former Eastern Europe. Some of these countries have had a fast implementation of transitional justice measures and successful democratization. Yet, despite adopting an early mechanism of transitional justice, others did not necessarily have any particular success in their democratic endeavour. On the other hand, additional states have had democratic consolidation despite not undertaking such rapid measures (for example Estonia), while others have failed either to adopt the transitional justice mechanisms or democratizing at all (i.e., Belarus). The present paper offers a theoretical framework that seeks to capture and explain such dynamics and by referring specifically to the telling cases of Romania and Albania, to explain what role and impact transitional justice measures have in democratic transitions.
Journal Article
Velvet totalitarianism : post-Stalinist Romania
This book introduces students and the general public to the post-Stalinist phase of totalitarianism, focusing on Romania under the Ceausescu dictatorship, through the dual optic of scholarship and fiction, in a story about a family surviving difficult times under a totalitarian regime due to the strength of their love.
eBook
Recuperative memory in Romanian post-Communist society
This paper explores the idea of “recuperative memory” with respect to the process of coming to terms with the past after the fall of the Romanian Communist regime in 1989. Its method is to examine the mechanisms used by recuperative memory in order to re-appropriate the past and emphasize the inherently mediated and multifaceted nature of this process. Using various examples from oral testimonies, autobiographical writings, literary works, and cinema, the paper argues that the role of recuperative memory is not only to facilitate the process of coming to terms with the past, but also to offer the material necessary to sustain a viable politics of memory. This entails providing a platform for the intergenerational transmission of memory and knowledge for those who did not live under the Communist regime, filling in this way the intergenerational gap, despite the lack of political class engagement.
Journal Article
Oral Histories and Institutional Narratives: Preserving the Stories of the Romanian Communist Past
The Romanian post-totalitarian recount of the communist past embraces various forms: from individual and civic actions to recollect the memories of the past and gather testimonies from the regime's victims, to institutionalized forms of memory and public memory discourse. The research described in this paper focused on the use of oral history as a mechanism to recollect the past and its effects at the level of the Romanian society: the creation of new institutions dedicated to researching the past, agents of memory, public memory discourse, political class reluctance, mass media, and the resulting politics of memory. The paper shows that this remembrance involves a permanent reconstruction of the past in which different agents of memory are involved, all of whom consequently project their own interests, ideas, and in some cases stereotypes onto their perceptions of the past. identifying different topics and approaches to past narratives, we argue that the permanent dialogue and openness to others' stories can offer valuable insights into the remembrance process, especially when traumatic events are involved.
Journal Article
Kinship of Paper: Genealogical Charts as Bureaucratic Documents
Ethnographies of groups who draw genealogical charts are relatively common in anthropology. Bringing the ethnographic gaze to bear on genealogical charts drawn up by bureaucratic and legal institutions, however, is a fairly rare methodological strategy in both the anthropology of bureaucracy and kinship studies. Hybridizing these two bodies of anthropological theory and using ethnographic material on post‐socialist housing restitution in Romania, I describe how bureaucratic and legal institutions co‐create genealogical charts and use them as tools to make the composition of kin networks legible and to verify and validate them. Several articles of the Civil Code strictly regulate inheritance, amounting to what might be called, after Malinowski, the state's bastard algebra of kinship. These legal prescriptions inscribe kinship in bureaucratic certificates, documents, and genealogical charts, which help state institutions reach legal certainty about the flow of inheritance rights. Rather than simply dismissing genealogical charts as false science, anthropologists might approach them as a mundane form of statecraft and as bureaucratic inscriptions able to author social worlds and make law active in everyday life.
Journal Article
The Diverse Economies of Housing
This paper questions the uncritical transfer of neoliberal concepts, such as financialisation and overreliance on conceptual dichotomies like formal/informal, as the lenses through which to understand practices of housing provision and consumption in the post-communist space. To this end, it introduces the newly-established ‘diverse economies’ framework, which has been used elsewhere to reveal existing and possible alternatives to advanced capitalism. Applied to the Romanian case, the lens of diverse economic practices helps shed light on the ways in which the current housing system was historically constituted, with implications for how housing consumption is now stratified across some related housing typologies. The paper invites debate on the theoretical usefulness of the diverse economies framework to study housing phenomena, particularly its implications for understanding patterns of inequality and poverty, its potential to devise useful analytical categories, and its effect of directing attention to acts of resistance to neoliberal capitalism.
Journal Article
Serving the New Class: The Dynamics of Educational Transitions for Romanian Adults Born Before 1985 During Communism and Afterwards
The present article aims to investigate the dynamics of access to the upper secondary and tertiary levels of the educational career of several cohorts of Romanian adults born before 1985 by analyzing the expansion of educational levels and the dynamics of the inequalities in probabilities of access to these levels in Romania by applying the logistic response model to explain the variations in probabilities of realizing the transition to the vocational and the baccalaureate level in the upper secondary and to the higher education in the case of almost 5,000 Romanian citizens surveyed in 2010. The main result of the study is that, contrary to what is suggested by gross enrollment figures, throughout de decades of communism net access to education improved only in case of the vocational upper secondary school while the academic track just kept in pace with the evolution of the distribution of instruction of parents. In other words, the data provides strong support for the thesis of the 'new class', that states that the class of persons holding secondary level degrees, not Communist Party members especially, demanded a dramatic expansion of the academic high schools in order to preserve their educational status throughout the generation of their children and explain thus the expansion of academic track of the upper secondary in absolute figures although without improvements of access opportunities.
Journal Article