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1. Transitional justice and authoritarian backsliding

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-020-09315-5  

   Nalepa, Monika (August 2020, Constitutional Political Economy)

   Can a lack of transitional justice contribute to democratic backsliding? This paper uses the case of Poland to argue that selective enforcement of transitional justice can be linked to democratic erosion. In doing so, the paper adjudicates between two theories of democratic backsliding. The first, advanced by Milan Svolik, argues that elite polarization drives erosion: when political candidates are ideologically far apart, citizens who strongly prefer one over the other may turn a blind eye to antidemocratic transgressions by their preferred candidate to prevent the competing candidate from winning. The second theory, presented by Nalepa, Vanberg, and Ciopris (NVC), describes an equilibrium where voters are uncertain whether the candidate they are dealing with is a closet autocrat or an ideological incumbent, but reelect him into office regardless. This theory posits that a closet autocrat is reelected into office because his first period actions are identical to those of an ideological incumbent. I argue that judiciary reforms in Poland reflect exactly the kind of incumbent actions that are consistent both with the actions of an ideological incumbent and with the actions of a closet autocrat. Using survey data from Poland, I find evidence of elite polarization, offering support for the first theory, but also find ample evidence of polarization in the electorate and of a belief structure supportive of the equilibrium from NVC. I present Hungary’s experience with transitional justice and the rule of law as a shadow case to illustrate similar dynamics to those taking place in Poland. 

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2. Can Transitional Justice Improve the Quality of Representation in New Democracies

   Nalepa, Monika; And, Milena (October 2020, World politics)

   Can transitional justice enhance democratic representation in countries recovering from authoritarian rule? We argue that lustration, the policy of revealing secret collaboration with the authoritarian regime, can prevent former authoritarian elites from extorting policy concessions from past collaborators who have become elected politicians. Absent lustration, former elites can threaten to reveal information about past collaboration unless politicians implement policies these elites desire. In this way, lustration laws enable politicians to avoid blackmail and become responsive to their constituents, improving the quality of representation. We show that whether lustration enhances representation depends on its severity and the extent to which dissidents- turned-politicians suffer if their skeletons come out. We also find that the potential to blackmail politicians increases as the ideological distance between authoritarian elites and politicians decreases. We test this theory with original data from the Global Transitional Justice Datast spanning 84 countries that transitioned to democracy since 1946. 

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3. Parity as radical pragmatism: Centering farm justice and agrarian expertise in agricultural policy

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1066465  

   Graddy-Lovelace, Garrett; Krikorian, Jacqueline; Jewett, Andrea; Vivekanandan, Avinash; Stahl, Katherine; Singh, Indra Shekhar; Wilson, Brad; Naylor, Patti; Naylor, George; Pennick, Edward Jerry (March 2023, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems)

   Rather than treating symptoms of a destructive agri-food system, agricultural policy, research, and advocacy need both to address the root causes of dysfunction and to learn from longstanding interventions to counter it. Specifically, this paper focuses on agricultural parity policies – farmer-led, government-enacted programs to secure a price floor and manage supply to prevent the economic and ecological devastation of unfettered corporate agro-capitalism. Though these programs remain off the radar in dominant policy, scholarship, and civil society activism, but in the past few years, vast swaths of humanity have mobilized in India to call for agri-food systems transformation through farmgate pricing and market protections. This paper asks what constitutes true farm justice and how it could be updated and expanded as an avenue for radically reimagining agriculture and thus food systems at large. Parity refers to both a pricing ratio to ensure livelihood, but also a broader farm justice movement built on principles of fair farmgate prices and cooperatively coordinated supply management. The programs and principles are now mostly considered “radical,” deemed inefficient, irrelevant, obsolete, and grievous government overeach—but from the vantage, we argue, of a system that profits from commodity crop overproduction and agroindustry consolidation. However, by examining parity through a producer-centric lens cognizant of farmers‘ ability, desire, and need to care for the land, ideas of price protection and supply coordination become foundational, so that farmers can make a dignified livelihood stewarding land and water while producing nourishing food. This paradox—that an agricultural governance principle can seem both radical and common sense, far-fetched and pragmatic—deserves attention and analysis. As overall numbers of farmers decline in Global North contexts, their voices dwindle from these conversations, leaving space for worldviews favoring de-agrarianization altogether. In Global South contexts maintaining robust farming populations, such policies for deliberate de-agrarianization bely an aggression toward rural and peasant ways of life and land tenure. Alongside the history of parity programs, principles, and movements in U.S., the paper will examine a vast version of a parity program in India – the Minimum Support Price (MSP) system, which Indian farmers defended and now struggle to expand into a legal right. From East India to the plains of the United States and beyond, parity principles and programs have the potential to offer a pragmatic direction for countering global agro-industrial corporate capture, along with its de-agrarianization, and environmental destruction. The paper explores what and why of parity programs and movements, even as it addresses the complexity of how international parity agreements would unfold. It ends with the need for global supply coordination grounded in food sovereignty and solidarity, and thus the methodological urgency of centering farm justice and agrarian expertise. 

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4. Building Voice Upon Voice: Truth, Memory, and Activism in The Gambia’s Transitional Justice Process

   https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.3920  

   Ndow, Aminata (June 2025, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy)

   This article examines The Gambia’s Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC), assessing its achievements, challenges, and impact on transitional justice. Established in 2018 to investigate human rights abuses under Yahya Jammeh’s regime, the TRRC documented testimonies of torture, enforced disappearances, and systemic violence, creating a historical record and recommending reparative measures. However, its lack of prosecutorial power, political resistance, and structural limitations raise concerns about justice and accountability. Based on ethnographic research at the Women’s Association for Victims’ Empowerment (WAVE), this study explores how families of the disappeared navigate mourning and memory in the absence of closure. Drawing on Derrida, Ricœur, Foucault, and Arendt, it analyzes truth, power, and collective memory in shaping post-TRRC reconciliation efforts. While the TRRC provided a crucial platform for truth-telling, its legacy depends on sustained civil society advocacy and structural reform. This article argues that effective transitional justice requires grassroots activism, victim-centered approaches, and community-led initiatives beyond formal commissions. 

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5. Accountability by the Numbers: Introducing the Global Transitional Justice Events Dataset (1946-2016)

   Bates, Genevieve; Cinar, Ipek; Nalepa, Monika (June 2019, Perspectives on politics)

   In an era of democratic backsliding, scholars and policymakers wonder if failure to reckon with former authoritarian elites and their collaborators plays a role. Yet without adequate data on the way former autocracies and countries emerging from conflict deal with human rights violators, it is hard to tell if new democracies are unstable because of their failure to reckon with their former authoritarian elites or despite it. We introduce a dataset of personnel transitional justice events that allows scholars to answer such questions, disaggregating these events temporally from the date of a country’s democratization. The time series nature of our data allows scholars to measure key characteristics of states’ dealing with their past and complements existing transitional justice datasets by focusing not only on post-conflict societies and not only on post-authoritarian societies, but on both. To showcase the possibilities our data affords scholars, we use it to develop three novel measures of personnel transitional justice: severity, urgency, and volatility. The granular structure of our data allows researchers to construct additional measures depending on their theoretical questions of interest. We illustrate the use of severity of transitional justice in a regression that also employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project. 

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