By | Gage Garretson

As a graduate student in the 1990s, Nadya Nedelsky—now associate professor and chair of international studies at Macalester—had intended to study right-wing nationalism in Germany but grew fascinated by the events taking place at the time in post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. Of particular interest to her: how Central and Eastern European countries were dealing with their communist pasts. This interest developed into her dissertation on Czech and Slovak national identities and their implications for state-building, and a research agenda focused on ethnicities, nationalism, and transitional justice.

This year, that research agenda has led to a new publication, Post-Communist Transitional Justice: Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Nedelsky co-edited the book with her colleague Lavinia Stan from St. Francis Xavier in Nova Scotia, Canada. The cover of the book pictures a statue of Vladimir Lenin with its head severed, and posits the book’s discussion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Central and East European communist regimes and their individual progressions since 1989. The book explores four themes: the causes of transitional justice (why states choose their strategies), quantitative and qualitative models on the effects and impacts of certain strategies, key challenges (themes emerging in the region), and neglected factors and actors (civil societies, theater, grassroots activism). Nedelsky wrote the introduction and conclusion to the book, and she helped edit 13 chapters written by experts in the field.

Nedelsky and Stan, who met as graduate students at the University of Toronto, began their work on transitional justice in 2002, when they participated in their first conference together, the Canadian Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Toronto. From there, they kept in touch and worked together on common projects.  Before Post-Communist Transitional Justice, they completed a three-volume Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, also from Cambridge University Press.

This fall, Nedelsky, who teaches the popular course Transitional Justice for the Human Rights and Humanitarianism concentration, will be in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar researching German reactions to immigration. She will be working at Humboldt University’s Department of Diversity and Social Conflict in Berlin. “Now with the Fulbright,” Nedelsky says, “I am able to go back to my roots and refocus my interests in national identity and immigration in Germany.”

June 29 2015

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