Doctoral student Saygun Gökarýksel, under the guidance of Professor Katherine Verdery, will undertake research on transitional justice procedures used in post-conflict areas. The research will contribute to a better understanding of how human rights and notions of truth, individual and collective responsibility, memory, and reconciliation function under different historical and political conditions.
The research will be carried out in Poland, where Gökarýksel will investigate the contemporary judicial uses of old Communist-era secret security files. Through archival and ethnographic research, Gökarýksel will focus on the judicial process called lustration, which uses these files to ban former security service officers and collaborators from holding public office. Departing from the studies that conceive lustration as a legal process that merely deals with the legacy of past injustice, this research will examine how lustration operates in political contexts and the broader legal and political-economic transformations from state socialism, how it connects to human rights and other transitional justice procedures, its relationship to nation-state building, the production of historical truth, and remaking of the citizen-subject. Gökarýksel will combine novel research methods by treating archives and archival practices as objects of ethnographic inquiry, observing court proceedings and analyzing courtroom examinations, conducting life-history interviews, and public discourse analysis. Data from these different sources will then be analytically contrasted and compared.
The research is important for several reasons. Lustration is currently practiced throughout former socialist Europe and has significant consequences for how post-socialist states are developing. Focusing on lustration will also contribute to theorizing other kinds of post-conflict reconciliation processes in new ways. Funding this research supports the education of a graduate student.
My project analyzes aspects of legal and ethico-political reconstructions of the socialist past in Poland, with an emphasis on the public lives of the Communist Secret Service files. It focuses on a screening process, which determines whether a public/state employee collaborated or not with the Communist Secret Service by using these files as evidentiary source. Examining this judicial process this project contributes to the scholarship on truth and reconciliation commissions in different parts of the world (from Latin America to Africa and the Middle East) and human rights, as well as the modern state and surveillance. This research provides a comparative perspective on the use of truth and knowledge in the context of democratization processes. Today many consider "dealing with the past" as indispensable for post-authoritarian countries to facilitate liberal democracy, legitimate the new political order, and do justice to past wrongs. While acknowledging the centrality of these assumptions, this project provides a critical perspective on the kind of justice, commonly called transitional justice, that is detached from any broader vision of political and social justice. It examines the process of producing truth and knowledge of the past and practices of human rights and explores the effects of this has on people's lives. It analyzes the social aspects and effects of the Polish transitional justice process and the strategic uses of human rights discourse.
