Mobility Phase: University of Bremen | Freie Universität Berlin
Control, Privacy, Crime and the Rule of Law in Eastern Europe: Historical Legacies and Current Challenges
Monika Rogers (née Kareniauskaitė) is a Researcher at the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania. Her work is on criminal law and criminal justice in Lithuania and in the Soviet Union after 1917. She also focuses on anti-Soviet resistance, Soviet political trials and deportations, the dissident movement, and historical memory and the culture of remembrance in the former Eastern Bloc and USSR. In 2017 she received a PhD in History from Vilnius University, where she also completed B.A. and M.A. degrees in History. She has been a Research Fellow at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland (2013-2014), and a Project Coordinator and Research Assistant at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial (2015-2016). As part of this work she co-authored the section on Lithuania in the study Honoring Civil Courage: Developing Suggestions to Improve the Situation of Victims of Communist State Crimes. Monika also currently heads a research project at Vytautas Magnus University dedicated to gender-based violence in twentieth-century Lithuania. In 2019 she was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University (USA).
Control, Privacy, Crime and the Rule of Law in Eastern Europe: Historical Legacies and Current Challenges
The aim of the proposed research project is to investigate how the state-socialist legal systems of the post-World War II and Cold War period defined the concepts of “crime”, “privacy”, “control” and “the rule of law” in legal theory and practice – and which impact these definitions had on legal reforms that took place in former Soviet-impact space after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. To investigate these processes and transformations, we will use the cases of three former Soviet impact areas and states: Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania and German Democratic Republic. The project will question and emphasize, what kind of vulnerabilities Eastern European states and societies might experience or are already experiencing because of their non-democratic past and because of long-years’ experience of living in the legal systems that rather imitated than internalized the basic democratic principles concerning the rule of law, legality and justice.
