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A public lecture by Professor Roman David supported by the Centre for the Study of Central Europe
In Communists and Their Victims (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Roman David identifies and examines four classes of justice measures—retributive, reparatory, revelatory, and reconciliatory—to discover which, if any, rectified the legacy of human rights abuses committed during the communist era in the Czech Republic.
Conducting interviews, focus groups, and nationwide surveys between 1999 and 2015, David looks at the impact of financial compensation and truth-sharing on victims’ healing and examines the role of retribution in the behavior and attitudes of communists and their families.
Emphasizing the narratives of former political prisoners, secret collaborators, and former Communist Party members, David tests the potential of justice measures to contribute to a shared sense of justice and their ability to overcome the class structure and ideological divides of a formerly communist regime.
Identifying “justice without reconciliation” as the primary factor hampering the process of overcoming the past in the Czech Republic, Communists and Their Victims promotes a transformative theory of justice that demonstrates that justice measures, in order to be successful, require a degree of reconciliation.
All welcome, no need to register. Room 347
There will be a reception following Professor David’s lecture.
Roman David is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is the author of Lustration and Transitional Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), which proposed the concept of exclusive, inclusive, and reconciliatory systems, and was awarded the Concept Analysis Prize by IPSA in 2012. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Psychology, American Journal of Sociology, and other indexed journals. He was previously a Reader in Politics at Newcastle University and held visiting positions at Oxford, the University of the Witwatersrand, Yale, and Harvard.
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