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.
Monika 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.
This Fellow Talk is a closed event.
