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Facing History: Sovereignty and the Spectacles of Justice and Violence in Poland's Capitalist Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 December 2018

Saygun Gökariksel
Saygun Gökariksel*
Affiliation:
Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice through an analysis of the public exhibitions of the faces of communist-era secret service officers in Poland. During the rule of right-wing government from 2005 to 2007, the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) organized exhibitions in public squares across Poland, which stirred much contention. Was it a pursuit of justice or a call for public lynching? Was it a means to ensure public transparency and identify the “faceless” evil of communism, or instead a political instrument of anti-communist nationalists? In some places, like the deindustrialized city of Katowice, the exhibition even met with devastating attacks. Focusing on this event in Katowice, I use media reports, interviews, and other ethnographic material to explore what the IPN-led state spectacles of justice, particularly the figure of the face and the defacement practices they employ, reveal about tensions and contradictions of “post-socialist” sovereignty; how the figure of the (secret) communist agent has come to facialize both the unfinished reckoning with communist-era state violence and the “normalized” violence of capitalist transformation. I argue that past violence, which is the typical object of transitional justice, needs to be approached in a dynamic and relational manner, with a focus on the conjunctures—how different forms of violence become transformed, reproduced, or entangled across time and space. My comparative perspective on transitional justice highlights the problems caused when its nationalist appropriation becomes entangled with capital's violence.

Keywords

transitional justicesovereigntyviolencefaceright-wing populismpost-socialismPolandEastern Europe
Type
Moral Codes of States in Transition
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 111 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2018 

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