A01=John W. Borneman
Accountability
Ancien Régime
Anonymity
Attempt
Author_John W. Borneman
Bulgarians
Bundestag
Bureaucrat
Category=JHM
Category=JPA
Category=JPQB
Category=LAB
Codification (law)
Communism
Constitutionalism
Crime
Criticism
Decommunization
Decree
Democracy
Dictatorship
Dissident
Domestication
East-Central Europe
Economic restructuring
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Erich Honecker
Extortion
Fraud
Government
Gross indecency (criminal offence)
Head of state
Homicide
Humboldt University of Berlin
Implementation
Imprisonment
Indictment
Institution
Judicial independence
Judiciary of Germany
Jurist
Legal history
Legal practice
Legitimacy (political)
Medical ethics
Michel Foucault
Minority group
Mitarbeiter (NSDAP)
Nomenklatura
Organized crime
Party secretary
Petitioner
Politburo
Politician
Power structure
Privatization
Prosecutor
Public figure
Rechtsstaat
Regime
Relativism
Restitution
Retributive justice
Rule of law
Russians
Salzgitter
Separation of powers
Socialist state
South Korea
Sovereignty
Spouse
Stasi
Suspect
Treaty
Veil of ignorance
West Germany
Product details
- ISBN 9780691016818
- Weight: 312g
- Dimensions: 197 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 23 Nov 1997
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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As new states in the former East bloc begin to reckon with their criminal pasts in the years following a revolutionary change of regimes, a basic pattern emerges: In those states where some form of retributive justice has been publicly enacted, there has generally been much less of a recourse to collective retributive violence. In Settling Accounts, John Borneman explores the attempts by these aspiring democratic states to invoke the principles of the "rule of law" as a means of achieving retributive justice, that is, convicting wrongdoers and restoring dignity to victims of moral injuries. Democratic regimes, Borneman maintains, require a strict form of accountability that holds leaders responsible for acts of criminality. This accountability is embodied in the principles of the rule of law, and retribution is at the moral center of these principles. Drawing from his ethnographic work in the former East Germany and with select comparisons to other East-Central European states, Borneman critically examines the construction of categories of criminality.
He argues against the claims that economic growth, liberal democracy, or acts of reconciliation are adequate means to legitimate the transformed East bloc states. The cycles of violence in states lacking a system of retributive justice help to support this claim. Invocation of the principles of the rule of law must be seen as a chance for a more democratic, more accountable, and less violent world.
John Borneman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the author of After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin, Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation, and Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture.
