CERES faculty member Robert Austin has a new chapter in Post-Communist Transitional Justice, Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience, edited by Lavinia Stan (St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia) and Nadya Nedelsky (MacAlester College, Minnesota) recently published with Cambridge University Press.

Given the nature of Albanian communism between 1944 and 1991, the need for sustained and serious transitional justice was vital to a successful exit from communism. Despite this, Albanian citizens never got the reckoning with the past that they deserved. Austin’s chapter provides a detailed account of the largely failed process of transitional justice in Albania from 1992 to 2014. Building on a previously published article and book chapter, it argues that although Albania was a pioneer in initiating transitional justice laws in the Balkans in the early 1990s, it failed in two successive attempts, beginning first in 1995 and again in 2009, to offer more than transitional justice as a way to electoral victory.

By 1995 the political maneuvering of the elites had served to alienate the Albanian citizenry from the newly introduced laws who saw the laws for what they were; in 2009 the failure of the process occurred in a different context. The introduction of the new transitional justice laws, which were designed to win an election, was ultimately plagued by the same political maneuvering of the previous decade. However, the growth of civil society, the rule of law, and shifting international attitudes presented a new challenge to the once politicized actions of the government. The fact that the laws failed because Albania finally had somewhat independent courts and a vibrant civil society is the good news. The bad news is that Albania’s on and off again experiment with a deeply politicized transitional justice process had ended leaving Albanians without any real justice.

Further information about this publication can be found on the website of Cambridge University Press.