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Despite their increased popularity in Latin America, Africa and Asia, truth commissions have remained an overlooked solution to coming to terms with the recent human rights abuses perpetrated in communist Europe. Since the start of the democratization process in the early 1990s, only Germany, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and Romania have employed truth commissions as methods to reckon with communist crimes. These five commissions share important similarities and...

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...

The article analyses the second life of the concept of genocide In public, scholarly and legal post-2006 discourses about how to deal with the communist past In Romania. It counterpoises such problematic radical condemnations with recent developments In local historical studies. The contribution focuses on a new generation of historians (In their thirties and early forties), exemplifying these approaches by discussing novel studies about repression, Institutions and biographies. It argues...

In 2006, Poland and Romania embarked on renewed lustration programmes. These late lustration policies expanded the scope and transparency measures associated with lustration as a form of transitional justice. While early lustration measures targeted political elites, late lustration policies include public and private sector positions, such as journalists, academics, business leaders, and others in ‘positions of public trust’. Given the legal controversy and moral complexity surrounding...

Résumé Pendant la guerre d'indépendance algérienne, la justice constitua une des armes du combat contre les nationalistes et ceux qui les soutenaient. Fondée sur des législations d'exception, cette intervention fut massive et impliqua d'emblée les tribunaux militaires. L'ensemble de la guerre fut d'ailleurs marqué par un processus de militarisation de la justice. Cette répression judiciaire eut pour principal effet la multiplication des peines capitales dont 200, environ, furent suivies...

Through a comparative analysis of Germany and Russia, this paper explores how participation in the memorialization process affects and reflects national identity formation in post‐totalitarian societies. These post‐totalitarian societies face the common problem of re‐presenting their national character as civic and democratic, in great part because their national identities were closely bound to oppressive regimes. Through a comparison of three memorial sites—Sachsenhausen concentration camp...

Helga Schultz reconsidera la RDA y su forma nacional desde un punto de vista germano-oriental. Entiende la RDA como un intento de construir una peculiar nación socialista alemana, pero laimposibilidad de alcanzar esta aspiración es examinada junto con la sorprendente división entre ambas partes de la nueva Alemania «unida» y la nueva eínicizaci¿n de los alemanes del Este. El articulo revisa también la «sociedad obrera» socialista, como producto del socialismo real.

El Partido del Socialismo Democrático (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus), surgido de la descomposición interna del SED (Sozialistiscbe Einbeitspartei Deutschlands), es un caso relevante de adaptación de los partidos únicos en los regímenes comunistas a la democracia plurípar-tidista. Dadas las peculiaridades de la transición en la República Democrática de Alemania, acelerada por su rápida integración en la República Federal, el SED no tuvo la oportunidad de transformarse en una...

La movilización de todos los recursos durante la Guerra Civil Española alcanzó también el ámbito de la Cultura y la Gestión del Patrimonio. Si bien son más conocidas iniciativas relacionadas con el Museo del Prado o la Biblioteca Nacional, desde el principio se tuvo en cuenta la creación de un Archivo de la Guerra, donde se reunirían todos los testimonios escritos de todas aquellas unidades militares o asociaciones políticas que lucharon en defensa de la República. Este archivo, después de...

In Japan's case, there was hardly any awareness of the Nanjing atrocities in wartime, such sensibilities being deprived of fuel by censorship and overwhelmed by popular war fever and the desire to see Japan as the champion of international justice. The civil war with the Nationalists and the ensuing Cold War meant that PRC propaganda regarding Nanjing focused on Nationalist incompetence and US dastardliness, as in purported ulterior motives behind the establishment of the Nanjing safety zone for civilian Chinese.

This article contributes to the relational IR literature on identity politics and Sino-Japanese relations. Theoretically, we develop Rumelili's framework for studying modes of differentiation by incorporating the sectoral characteristics of key discourse signs. Empirically, we apply this framework to the construction of Self and Other in the official Japanese security discourse regarding the Senkaku Islands dispute from 2010–2014, a period of dispute climax that is meaningful for studying...

The centrality of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese collective memory has been often perceived by the country’s neighbours, i.e. the People’s Republic of China and South Korea, as a pillar of the country’s (alleged) ‘victim consciousness’ and amnesia in regard to the suffering inflicted on others. For this reason, the matter of how Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s fate is discussed on the pages of joint teaching materials is an interesting puzzle. The article uses two...

Recent studies have increasingly argued that the Chinese leadership uses Japan’s imperialistic past as a tool for domestic and political bargaining. However, this argument fails to appreciate the embedded nature of negative memories within China. This article forwards an alternative argument by situating Japanese militaristic history within Chinese national identity. By examining a wide range of Chinese primary sources often underutilized by International Relations (IR) analysts, it moves...

On China's web, networked actors ranging from state agencies to private Internet users engage in highly active online discourse. Yet as diverse as this discourse may be, political content remains highly regulated, particularly on issues that affect the legitimacy of the ruling party. A prominent issue in this regard has been modern Chinese history, particularly the "national humiliation" that Japan inflicted on China's populace during events like the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. This article asks...

UNESCO’s ‘Memory of the World’ Programme promotes the preservation, universal access and public awareness of the world’s significant documents as the common heritage of all humankind. The inscription of the ‘Documents of Nanjing Massacre’ into the ‘Memory of the World’ Register in 2015 reflects an increasingly globalised concern in the post–Cold War era over the remembrance of war and atrocity. Yet it has reignited the tension between Japan and China, resulting in strong pressure on UNESCO to...