Doctoral Dissertation Research: Politics of Purification of the State in Postsocialist Poland

博士生Saygun Gökarýksel在Katherine Verdery教授的指导下，将对冲突后地区使用的过渡时期司法程序进行研究。这项研究将有助于更好地了解人权和真理、个人和集体责任、记忆和和解等概念如何在不同的历史和政治条件下发挥作用。这项研究将在波兰进行，在那里Gökarýksel将调查共产主义时代旧秘密安全档案的当代司法用途。通过档案和人种学研究，Gökarýksel将重点关注被称为“例证”的司法程序，该程序利用这些文件禁止前安全服务官员和合作者担任公职。从将例证视为仅仅处理过去不公正遗产的法律程序的研究出发，本研究将研究例证如何在政治背景下运作，以及从国家社会主义开始的更广泛的法律和政治经济转型，它如何与人权和其他过渡司法程序联系起来，它与民族国家建设的关系，历史真相的产生，以及公民主体的重塑。Gökarýksel将结合新的研究方法，将档案和档案实践作为民族志调查的对象，观察法庭程序和分析法庭检查，进行生活史访谈和公共话语分析。然后将这些不同来源的数据进行分析对比和比较。这项研究之所以重要，有几个原因。光明目前在整个前社会主义欧洲都有实践，并对后社会主义国家的发展产生了重大影响。专注于阐释也将有助于以新的方式将其他类型的冲突后和解过程理论化。资助这项研究支持了研究生的教育。

Doctoral student Saygun Gökarýksel, under the guidance of Professor Katherine Verdery, will undertake research on transitional justice procedures used in post-conflict areas. The research will contribute to a better understanding of how human rights and notions of truth, individual and collective responsibility, memory, and reconciliation function under different historical and political conditions. The research will be carried out in Poland, where Gökarýksel will investigate the contemporary judicial uses of old Communist-era secret security files. Through archival and ethnographic research, Gökarýksel will focus on the judicial process called lustration, which uses these files to ban former security service officers and collaborators from holding public office. Departing from the studies that conceive lustration as a legal process that merely deals with the legacy of past injustice, this research will examine how lustration operates in political contexts and the broader legal and political-economic transformations from state socialism, how it connects to human rights and other transitional justice procedures, its relationship to nation-state building, the production of historical truth, and remaking of the citizen-subject. Gökarýksel will combine novel research methods by treating archives and archival practices as objects of ethnographic inquiry, observing court proceedings and analyzing courtroom examinations, conducting life-history interviews, and public discourse analysis. Data from these different sources will then be analytically contrasted and compared.The research is important for several reasons. Lustration is currently practiced throughout former socialist Europe and has significant consequences for how post-socialist states are developing. Focusing on lustration will also contribute to theorizing other kinds of post-conflict reconciliation processes in new ways. Funding this research supports the education of a graduate student.