Books by Raluca C Grosescu
Socialism and International Law: The Cold War and Its Legacies, 2024
his volume explores the overlooked role of state socialist intellectuals, experts, and government... more his volume explores the overlooked role of state socialist intellectuals, experts, and governments from Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia in developing international law in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By examining how different state socialist ideologies, legal principles, and realpolitik affected contemporary international law frameworks, the book contests existing linear and Western-dominated histories. The volume considers these state socialist engagements in interaction with liberal and Western approaches and underlines the divisions that existed between socialisms from different world regions and across the North–South divide. The legacies of the attempts at a socialist international law are still with us today, as are the consequences of its failure.
Justice and Memory after Dictatorship. Latin America, Central Eastern Europe, and the Fragmentation of International Criminal Law, 2024
Justice and Memory after Dictatorship: Latin America, Central Eastern Europe and the Fragmentatio... more Justice and Memory after Dictatorship: Latin America, Central Eastern Europe and the Fragmentation of International Criminal Law provides a groundbreaking socio-historical account of the global transformation of international criminal law from these two semi-peripheries of the world system. Based on ethnographic observation and analyses of jurisprudence, Raluca Grosescu dissects the narratives that were fundamentally shaped by the relationship of law and politics. Using paradigmatic cases and personal interviews with lawyers and judicial officials from Latin America and Eastern Europe, Grosescu uncovers how legal actors and organizations were instrumental in questioning an international order that marginalized the political violence that had unfolded in the two regions during the Cold War. Justice and Memory after Dictatorship is a significant volume in modern international criminal and human rights law and an important read for scholars, students, and legal practitioners alike.
Are there any lessons Romania can teach transitional justice scholars and practitioners? This boo... more Are there any lessons Romania can teach transitional justice scholars and practitioners? This book argues that important insights emerge when analyzing a country with a moderate record of coming to terms with its communist past. Taking a broad definition of transitional justice as their starting point, contributors provide fresh assessments of the history commission, court trials, public identifications of former communist perpetrators, commemorations, and unofficial artistic projects that seek to address and redress the legacies of communist human rights violations. Theoretical and practical questions regarding the continuity of state agencies, the sequencing of initiatives, their advantages and limitations, the reasons why some reckoning programs are enacted and others are not, and these measures’ efficacy in promoting truth and justice are answered throughout the volume. Contributors include seasoned scholars from Romania, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and current and former leaders of key Romanian transitional justice institutions.
Revue d'Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest, 2020
The collection investigates how the criminalization of communist regimes has become global discou... more The collection investigates how the criminalization of communist regimes has become global discourse and practice since 1989.
It explores how a variety of memory entrepreneurs from Central Eastern
Europe (CEE) mobilised transnationally and created strategic alliances
in order to forge, legitimise and consolidate an international ethos that
criminalised communism. The contributions illustrate the circulation of ideas and the transnational cooperation between different world regions, scuh CEE, Latin America, North America and Maghreb.
https://www.cairn.info/revue-revue-d-etudes-comparatives-est-ouest-2020-2.htm?fbclid=IwAR2pWOrhVuAeduf_U7Vg2R1NIIOuZoi9YDqHE42nu43AYZxQKALzIg-8Auw
Global Society, 2019
More than twenty years after Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London, this special issue examines the... more More than twenty years after Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London, this special issue examines the globalization of post-dictatorial and post-conflict justice and memory processes through the lens of interconnections and mutual influences between Europe and South America. The collection challenges the currently dominant literature on reckoning with violent pasts. It does so by moving beyond both analyses confined within specific national borders and diffusionist accounts of so-called “universalised” justice and mnemonic paradigms purportedly embraced worldwide. The Trans-Atlantic perspective provides scholars with an ideal opportunity to analyse empirically the nexus between global and local scales of action, and to highlight agency in transnational mnemopolitics. Through case studies of trans-regional entanglements, we contend that the globalization of memory and justice paradigms goes hand in hand with a fragmentation of, and on occasion competition between different narratives concerning dictatorial pasts, between international, regional and local understandings of “best practices” of dealing with political violence, and between various professional groups engaged in accountability and remembrance processes. The collection shows the multi-faceted nature of transnational transfers and collaborations, some of which reflect concepts that have become significant in the international arena, while others mirror ideas and practices with limited global impact that circulate only between “semi-peripheries” or between less influential networks of activists.
Journal of the History of International Law, 2019
This collection provides a balanced understanding of the socialist engagements with international... more This collection provides a balanced understanding of the socialist engagements with international criminal and humanitarian law, looking at the realpolitik agendas of state socialist countries while acknowledging their progressive contributions to the post-war international legal order.
Special Issue of Journal of the History of International Law, 3 / 2019
This volume considers the important and timely question of criminal justice as a method of addres... more This volume considers the important and timely question of criminal justice as a method of addressing state violence committed by non-democratic regimes. The book’s main objectives concern a fresh, contemporary, and critical analysis of transitional criminal justice as a concept and its related measures, beginning with the initiatives that have been put in place with the fall of the Communist regimes in Europe in 1989.
The book argues for re-thinking and re-visiting filters that scholars use to interpret main issues of transitional criminal justice, such as: the relationship between judicial accountability, democratisation and politics in transitional societies; the role of successor trials in re-writing history; the interaction between domestic and international actors and specific initiatives in shaping transitional justice; and the paradox of time in enhancing accountability for human rights violations. In order to accomplish this, the volume considers cases of domestic accountability in the post-1989 era, from different geographical areas, such as Europe, Asia and Africa, in relation to key events from various periods of time. In this way the approach, which investigates space and time-lines in key examples, also takes into account a longitudinal study of transitional criminal justice itself.
The volume represents the first in-depth analysis of the political conversion of the Romanian com... more The volume represents the first in-depth analysis of the political conversion of the Romanian communist elites after 1989. The originality the study relies on the uniqueness of quantitative data regarding the reproduction of the Romanian nomenklatura after 1989 and on an extensive qualitative interpretation of the programs of the post-communist political parties created by the former communist elites. The analysis also contributes to the general debate about elites’ transformation and social mobility during transition. On one hand, it challenges the theory of power conversion, showing that in Romania elites’ circulation had a larger scope then their reproduction and that the breakdown of the communist regime significantly affected social hierarchies. On the other hand, the taxonomy of the Romanian nomenklatura’s paths of conversion offers a wider and more nuanced perspective on elites’ transformation during post-communist transition than previous researches.
Book Chapters by Raluca C Grosescu
This chapter explores the relationship between legal culture and retrospective justice in transit... more This chapter explores the relationship between legal culture and retrospective justice in transition, in post-1989 Romania, Bulgaria and Germany. Most of the scholarship on post-communist transitional justice has emphasised the nature of the communist regime, the exit from dictatorship, or the party struggle for political power during transition as the main determinants that influenced judicial accountability after 1989. We argue that the legal culture, in particular, the judiciary’s understanding of legal formalism and international human rights law, is another important determinant, generally overlooked by the literature. The chapter first considers the evolution of legal ideology since World War II in Romania, Bulgaria, and Germany. It then analyses the legal debates on the application of retrospective accountability after 1989. It concludes that the different approaches to retrospective justice were strongly influenced by the dominant culture of legal experts.
This chapter explores the relationship between transitional criminal justice and history writing ... more This chapter explores the relationship between transitional criminal justice and history writing in post-Communist Romania. It analyses the trials held concerning the repression of the December 1989 popular uprising, focusing on the narratives they have produced about the fall of the Ceauşescu regime and the responsibility for state-perpetrated violence. On the one hand, we evaluate the various interpretations that trials have given the events of December 1989, the symbolic founding moment of a new political order, as well as the political legitimacies constructed around these narratives. On the other hand, the chapter contributes to the general debate on the role of transitional criminal justice in building a common historical understanding of a former dictatorial regime. We will show that in Romania, in spite of important contributions of these trials to a gradual normalisation of the historical discourse about December 1989, their epistemic function was compromised by the interference of politics in the working of justice, and by the lack of predictability in judicial procedures.
The present article analyses one of the factors that determined the partial failure of transition... more The present article analyses one of the factors that determined the partial failure of transitional justice in post-communist Romania. This factor is the role played by the political and civic actors who assumed a radical anticommunist identity in the aftermath of December 1989 and militated for a fast and deep-seated decommunization process. The main assumption of this paper is that besides the reproduction of former communist elites in public offices – phenomenon that hindered the decommunization process – the Romanian political and civic actors who claimed transitional justice were unable to built coherent methodologies and long term projects regarding this kind of policies.
Articles by Raluca C Grosescu
Journal of the History of Intrenational Law, 2019
This article analyses the role of Eastern European socialist governments and legal experts in enc... more This article analyses the role of Eastern European socialist governments and legal experts in encoding the non-applicability of statutory limitations to international crimes. It argues that socialist elites put this topic on the agenda of the international community in the 1960s through two interrelated processes. On the one hand, legal scholars cooperated with Western European lawyers in order to enforce the idea that the international crimes codified by the Nuremberg Charter should not be subject to prescription. On the other hand, Eastern European governments proposed and enabled-through their cooperation with African and Asian states-the adoption of the 1968 UN Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, this instrument became an important tool for advancing prosecutions of international crimes committed under dictatorships and violent conflicts, particularly in Central Eastern Europe and Latin America.
Global Society, 2019
More than twenty years after Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London, this special issue examines the... more More than twenty years after Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London, this special issue examines the globalization of post-dictatorial and post-conflict justice and memory processes through the lens of interconnections and mutual influences between Europe and South America. , we contend that the globalization of memory and
justice paradigms goes hand in hand with a fragmentation of, and on occasion competition between different narratives concerning dictatorial pasts, between international, regional and local understandings of “best practices” of dealing with political violence, and between various professional groups engaged in accountability and remembrance processes. The collection shows the multi-faceted nature of transnational transfers and collaborations, some of which reflect concepts that have become significant in the international arena, while others mirror ideas and practices with limited global impact that circulate only between “semi-peripheries” or between less influential networks of activists.
Journal of the History of International Law, 2019
This introductory essay provides an overview of the scholarship on state socialist engagements wi... more This introductory essay provides an overview of the scholarship on state socialist engagements with international criminal and humanitarian law, arguing for a closer scrutiny of the socialist world’s role in shaping these fields of law. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historiography on post-1945 international law-making has been generally dominated by a post-1989 sense of Western triumphalism over socialism, where the Soviet Union and its allies have been presented as obstructionists of liberal progress. A wave of neo-Marxist scholarship has more recently sought to recover socialist legal contributions to international law, without however fully addressing them in the context of Cold War political conflict and of gross human rights violations committed within the Socialist Bloc. In contrast, this collection provides a balanced understanding of the socialist engagements with international criminal and humanitarian law, looking at the realpolitik agendas of state socialist countries while acknowledging their progressive contributions to the post-war international legal order.
Global Society, 2019
This article examines the activity of two transnational advocacy networks concerned with holding ... more This article examines the activity of two transnational advocacy networks concerned with holding corporations and their representatives accountable for gross human rights violations committed during the last Argentinean dictatorship and the ongoing Colombian armed conflict. Based on these case studies, it illustrates how various experts and scholars construct and promote different visions of justice and best practices of dealing with corporate violence according to their own professional backgrounds and political beliefs. While transnational networks play an important role in reckoning with political and economic violence, their mobilization also creates a fragmented field of knowledge and practice where different professionals and networks seek to achieve justice, but also to impose themselves as the legitimate agents of these accountability processes.
International Journal of Transitional Justice
In 2016, over 25 years after the fall of the communist regime, the Romanian Supreme Court of Just... more In 2016, over 25 years after the fall of the communist regime, the Romanian Supreme Court of Justice convicted for the first time two former military officials for political crimes perpetrated in the 1950s, the harshest repressive period of the previous dictatorship. The verdicts marked a radical break with the prior legal approaches to prosecuting communist crimes in this country inasmuch as international criminal law (ICL) was now employed in order to overcome impunity. This article shows how the current shifts in Romanian jurisprudence have been built upon, and have drawn inspiration from, a recent global convergence towards the use of ICL for addressing the crimes of dictatorial regimes and the obstacles to their prosecution, such as amnesties or statutory limitations. It emphasizes the importance of noncoercive exogenous influences in enabling changes in the Romanian process of dealing with the past.
This article explores the relationship between criminal justice and historical master narratives ... more This article explores the relationship between criminal justice and historical master narratives about the communist past in post-1989 Bulgaria and Germany. It focuses on the legal and historical debates that have unfolded within the Bulgarian Revival Process trial and the trial of the National Defence Council of the former German Democratic Republic. Previous literature on transitional justice has argued that trials of former authoritarian officials have an important epistemic function for societies in transition, because they challenge and overturn the dominant historical accounts about the dictatorial regime. In contrast, this article shows how in two different post-communist cases the outcomes of trials had been influenced by entrenched master narratives about the ousted political order. Criminal justice thus played a limited role in providing new readings of the dictatorial past.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/dvGCyvAhJ6xE2Bspvdm3/full
This article analyses the role and the limits of transitology in framing transitional justice stu... more This article analyses the role and the limits of transitology in framing transitional justice studies after the collapse of dictatorial regimes in Southern Europe, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It examines the evolution of the scholarship with reference to three main topics that have been pioneered by transitologists and developed further by transitional justice scholars, namely: the connections between justice for past abuses and democratisation; the determinants of transitional justice; and the relationship between accountability and the passage of time. The article argues that while transitology has nurtured important research initiatives in the field of transitional justice, its approaches suffer from serious shortcomings. They remained overly prescriptive and short-term in focus, and they often dehistoricised social phenomena. Adopting a teleological perspective on transitions supposedly bound for democracy, they overlooked comparisons and interconnections between transitional justice processes originating in democratic contexts and those arising from dictatorial settings. Moreover, in their attempt to build general typologies and establish causalities between types of dictatorial regimes, exit modes from authoritarianism and justice mechanisms, transitological approaches often failed to explain the peculiarities of national cases, and likewise paid scant attention to international contexts and transnational interactions.
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Books by Raluca C Grosescu
It explores how a variety of memory entrepreneurs from Central Eastern
Europe (CEE) mobilised transnationally and created strategic alliances
in order to forge, legitimise and consolidate an international ethos that
criminalised communism. The contributions illustrate the circulation of ideas and the transnational cooperation between different world regions, scuh CEE, Latin America, North America and Maghreb.
https://www.cairn.info/revue-revue-d-etudes-comparatives-est-ouest-2020-2.htm?fbclid=IwAR2pWOrhVuAeduf_U7Vg2R1NIIOuZoi9YDqHE42nu43AYZxQKALzIg-8Auw
Special Issue of Journal of the History of International Law, 3 / 2019
The book argues for re-thinking and re-visiting filters that scholars use to interpret main issues of transitional criminal justice, such as: the relationship between judicial accountability, democratisation and politics in transitional societies; the role of successor trials in re-writing history; the interaction between domestic and international actors and specific initiatives in shaping transitional justice; and the paradox of time in enhancing accountability for human rights violations. In order to accomplish this, the volume considers cases of domestic accountability in the post-1989 era, from different geographical areas, such as Europe, Asia and Africa, in relation to key events from various periods of time. In this way the approach, which investigates space and time-lines in key examples, also takes into account a longitudinal study of transitional criminal justice itself.
Book Chapters by Raluca C Grosescu
Articles by Raluca C Grosescu
justice paradigms goes hand in hand with a fragmentation of, and on occasion competition between different narratives concerning dictatorial pasts, between international, regional and local understandings of “best practices” of dealing with political violence, and between various professional groups engaged in accountability and remembrance processes. The collection shows the multi-faceted nature of transnational transfers and collaborations, some of which reflect concepts that have become significant in the international arena, while others mirror ideas and practices with limited global impact that circulate only between “semi-peripheries” or between less influential networks of activists.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/dvGCyvAhJ6xE2Bspvdm3/full
It explores how a variety of memory entrepreneurs from Central Eastern
Europe (CEE) mobilised transnationally and created strategic alliances
in order to forge, legitimise and consolidate an international ethos that
criminalised communism. The contributions illustrate the circulation of ideas and the transnational cooperation between different world regions, scuh CEE, Latin America, North America and Maghreb.
https://www.cairn.info/revue-revue-d-etudes-comparatives-est-ouest-2020-2.htm?fbclid=IwAR2pWOrhVuAeduf_U7Vg2R1NIIOuZoi9YDqHE42nu43AYZxQKALzIg-8Auw
Special Issue of Journal of the History of International Law, 3 / 2019
The book argues for re-thinking and re-visiting filters that scholars use to interpret main issues of transitional criminal justice, such as: the relationship between judicial accountability, democratisation and politics in transitional societies; the role of successor trials in re-writing history; the interaction between domestic and international actors and specific initiatives in shaping transitional justice; and the paradox of time in enhancing accountability for human rights violations. In order to accomplish this, the volume considers cases of domestic accountability in the post-1989 era, from different geographical areas, such as Europe, Asia and Africa, in relation to key events from various periods of time. In this way the approach, which investigates space and time-lines in key examples, also takes into account a longitudinal study of transitional criminal justice itself.
justice paradigms goes hand in hand with a fragmentation of, and on occasion competition between different narratives concerning dictatorial pasts, between international, regional and local understandings of “best practices” of dealing with political violence, and between various professional groups engaged in accountability and remembrance processes. The collection shows the multi-faceted nature of transnational transfers and collaborations, some of which reflect concepts that have become significant in the international arena, while others mirror ideas and practices with limited global impact that circulate only between “semi-peripheries” or between less influential networks of activists.
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/dvGCyvAhJ6xE2Bspvdm3/full
Keywords: transitology, political transition, political transformation, postdictatorial regimes, democratization
which seek justice across the world,
and the ways their strategies are
informed by different national and regional contexts and diverse ideological and professional understandings
of accountability processes.
Conveners: Gruia Badescu, Nelly Bekus, Raluca Grosescu
This conference brings together museum practitioners and academics working in the field of dealing with the past in order to discuss the transnational circulation of ideas, cooperation and tensions between memorialization processes of right wing and left wing dictatorships in Europe. The conference aims to enhance collaboration between academics and practitioners and create dialogue between institutions whose activities are often confined to national borders. This conference is supported by the AHRC “Care for the Future” (UK) and Labex “Les Passés dans Le Présent” (FR) joint funded project The Criminalization of Dictatorial Pasts in Europe and Latin America in Global Perspective.