Call for Papers - "Legal Frames of Memory. Transitional Justice in Central and Eastern Europe"

Conference venue: Warsaw, Poland
Period: November 27-29, 2013
Deadline for submitting abstracts: June 30, 2013

The European Network Remembrance and Solidarity launched a call for papers for its conference "Legal Frames of Memory. Transitional Justice in Central and Eastern Europe", which will take place in Warsaw next November.

With the fall of communism and the emergence of a new social order came a need to re-determine fundamental societal values. Historical narratives promoted by the failed communist systems lost their validity, opening the past as a subject of intense and heated debate. Concepts of legal and moral responsibility became crucial to the process of negotiating new visions of the past. Law was not only used to build collective awareness, but also became a zone of contention for the interests and opinions of individuals, groups, and institutions of an emerging civil society.

The process of negotiating and administering justice was two-sided. On one hand, it included instruments of retributive justice, aiming to punish and exclude from public life those functionaries of the past regime who had violated human rights. On the other hand, its aim was to compensate the victims of human rights violations for their losses using restorative judicial instruments. During this process there developed a new system of values for societies undergoing democratization. The historical roles of victims and perpetrators were defined and as a result, a new narrative framework for debates on the past was established.

The conference aims at comparing the experiences of countries of Central and Eastern Europe and to discuss extensively the role of law and justice in memory processes. Since these issues have so far mainly drawn the attention of political scientists, lawyers, and economists, they have been discussed using specialist and technical discourses. Thus the symbolic dimension of the settlement processes has largely been neglected. When the issues were discussed in the context of remembrance, it was often from the perspective of state sponsored historical politics, having a pejorative connotation. This conference aims to examine transitional justice as an area not only of state activity but also that of various social groups. It seeks to examine the processes of negotiating and administering justice as an area where the social memory of the communist period was shaped, both at a system level and at the level of grassroots social movements.

In this context, the conference is going to examine the relationship between law and memory. Law will be examined as a framework of social memory from the perspective of legitimizing certain norms, values, and visions of the past, and also toward developing a framework of grassroots social activity wherein individuals and groups promote certain interests and historical narratives.

The subjects of the conference include, but are not limited to:

The conference welcomes speakers from various disciplines of humanities and social sciences, including sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers of law, who study the issues of justice and settlement processes in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe or in a global comparative perspective. Original research papers with sound theoretical and empirical underpinning will be preffered.

Languages of the conference: English, Polish (with simultaneous translation)
Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biographical statement by 30 June 2013 to genealogies@enrs.eu.
Abstracts will be selected by the academic committee. Accepted proposals will be notified by 30 July 2013. You will be asked to submit your final conference paper by 1 November.

Participation in the conference is free of charge. A limited number of travel refunds for younger scholars and doctoral students will be available. The conference is planning on the publication of selected papers in a peer-reviewed journal or in a volume by an international publisher.

European Network Remembrance and Solidarity
ul. Wiejska 17/4
00-048 Warsaw, Poland
tel.: +48 22 891 25 06
fax: +48 22 891 25 01
 
Ms Hanna Gospodarczyk
e-mail: hanna.gospodarczyk@enrs.eu
Ms Agnieszka Nosowska
e-mail: agnieszka.nosowska@enrs.eu
conference webiste