Moral Autopsy

While communism was proclaimed dead in Eastern Europe around 1989, archives of communist secret services lived on. They became the site of judicial and moral examination of lives, suspicions of treason or 'collaboration' with the criminalized communist regime, and contending notions of democracy, truth, and justice. Through close study of court trials, biographies, media, films, and plays concerning judges, academics, journalists, and artists who were accused of being communist spies in Poland, this critical ethnography develops the notion of moral autopsy to interrogate the fundamental problems underlying global transitional justice, especially, the binary of authoritarianism and liberalism and the redemptive notions of transparency and truth-telling. It invites us to think beyond Eurocentric teleology of transition, capitalist nation-state epistemology and prerogatives of security and property, and the judicialized and moralized understanding of history and politics.

Saygun Gökar-ksel's anthropological research on law, power, social struggles, and transitional justice is grounded in his personal political and academic experience in Istanbul, Kraków, New York, and Princeton. His writing appeared in journals across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and US including South Atlantic Quarterly, Comparative Studies in History and Society, and Dialectical Anthropology.