Lavinia Stan

St. Francis Xavier University · Department of Political Science

No elections or referenda were organized in Romania in 2022. The government was preoccupied primarily with the economic, social, and political consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which borders Romania. The ruling coalition, supported by the Social Democrats and the Liberals, was politically stable but undermined by an inability to adequat...

Religion has played a key role in Russia's aggression against Ukraine. The various Orthodox Churches present on the territory of Ukraine have taken opposite stands on the war. While the Russian Orthodox Church and the Moscow Patriarch have openly and fervently supported the aggression, although their jurisdiction extends to some Ukrainian faithful,...

Romania was affected by Cabinet instability, an energy crisis and the Covid‐19 pandemic in 2021, a year when no elections or referenda were held. Its self‐interested political elite, rocked by scandals related to plagiarism and preoccupied almost exclusively with the distribution of positions, was unable to address the oil and gas crisis affecting...

This chapter presents the situation regarding religion in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and Russia after 1989. In much of the region, religious groups refused to sit back and watch passively as the politicians shaped their countries into Western-style liberal democracies, preferring instead to be actively involved in the process....

Since 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church has selectively assessed its Soviet past. Initiatives such as the identification of former secret spies from among church leaders and clergymen, which could portray this majority denomination in a negative light as a collaborator of the repressive communist dictatorship, have been systematically ignored or do...

Proposals and author/volume editor CV should be sent to: mihaidragnea2018@gmail.com www.peterlang.com/abstract/serial/SEEH

This book is the first to systematically examine the connection between religion and transitional justice in post-communism. There are four main goals motivating this book: 1) to explain how civil society (groups such as religious denominations) contribute to transitional justice efforts to address and redress past dictatorial repression; 2) to asc...

Central and Southeast European Politics since 1989 - edited by Sabrina P. Ramet October 2019

This chapter considers the topics of nationalism, conservatism, homophobia, and religious intolerance in the Romanian Orthodox Church (RomOC, hereafter) after the collapse of communism in 1989. This analysis begins with a brief historical overview of the Church during the pre-communist and communist periods, and then turns its attention to presenti...

Since 1989, reforms have sought to align the Romanian post-communist intelligence community with its counterparts in established democracies. Enacted reluctantly and belatedly at the pressure of civil society actors eager to curb the mass surveillance of communist times and international partners wishing to rein in Romania’s foreign espionage and c...

In the twenty-five years since the Soviet Union was dismantled, the countries of the former Soviet Union have faced different circumstances and responded differently to the need to redress and acknowledge the communist past and the suffering of their people. While some have adopted transitional justice and accountability measures, others have chose...

Cambridge Core - Criminal Law - Transitional Criminal Justice in Post-Dictatorial and Post-Conflict Societies - edited by Agata Fijalkowski

Since 1989 Central and Eastern European countries have implemented a wide range of programs designed to help those societies reckon with the numerous human rights abuses perpetrated by the communist regimes after the end of the Second World War. Some of these programs (lustration and access to secret files) had never been enacted in other regions o...

Though vilified as instances of "parliamentary putsch," no-confidence censure motions remain significant constitutional tools through which the opposition can challenge the government in Romania, and publicly underscore its policy ineffectiveness in certain areas of activity. An overview of censure motions debated in the Romanian parliament from 19...

Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir. Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisatio...

The scholarship available to date identifies state and civil society actors as instrumental in advancing or blocking programs that redress past human rights abuses. This chapter points to yet another actor with a key role in promoting truth-telling initiatives in post-communism: individual justice seekers who speak on behalf of no civil society gro...

Taking stock of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, this volume explores how these societies have grappled with the serious human rights violations of past regimes. It focuses on the most important factors that have shaped the nature, speed, and sequence of transitional justice progra...

This new book ably edited by Lavinia Stan and Diane Vancea brings together timely contributions from younger and more established scholars from two continents that shed fresh light on the evolution of the fledgling Romanian democracy after 1989. It reminds us that Romania’s image and transition to democracy must be linked to the absence of market r...

Should a unified Korea confront the legacies of human rights abuses in North Korea (the DPRK), and if so, how? To answer these two related questions, it is worthwhile looking at the experience of Eastern Europe, which during 1945— 1989 was subjected to totalitarian communism, a regime system similar to North Korea’s. Drawing on the experience of ot...

No-confidence motions introduced in the Romanian parliament in 1989–2012 represented important tools of legislative control over the executive. Simple and censure motions employed by the opposition against the government tackled the most important issues affecting the country, the government's perceived failure to enact its programme, and areas con...

Taking stock of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe, this volume explores the ways these societies have grappled with the serious human rights violations of past regimes. It focuses on the most important factors that have shaped the nature, speed, and sequence of transitional justice p...

Among the debates that have torn post-communist Eastern European societies apart none has been more contentious than that revolving around the ordinary citizens' resistance to and collaboration with the secret political police responsible for communist-era repression. 1 This cathartic exercise has attempted to sort the villain collaborators who acc...

On 1 January 2007, two of Eastern Europe’s predominantly Orthodox countries, Romania and Bulgaria, officially became EU members. This brought to three the number of predominantly Orthodox EU member states, with Greece having been one since 1981. To be accepted in the union, a country must meet several pre-accession criteria that indicate its commit...

In the only text that examined the impact of state-free groups on the process of reckoning with the communist past in Romania, Grosescu (2007) argued that civil actors “were unable to build coherent methodologies and long-term projects” regarding transitional justice (p. 183). The statement rings true when applied to judicial methods. Nevertheless,...

This comprehensive three-volume reference work collects and summarizes the wealth of information available in the field of transitional justice. Transitional justice is an emerging domain of inquiry that has gained importance with the regime changes in Latin America after the 1970s, the collapse of the European and Soviet communist regimes in 1989...

During the first two decades following the collapse of the communist regime, Romania has reckoned with the human rights infringements perpetrated from 1945 to 1989 with the help of a range of official and unofficial, judiciary and non-judiciary, backward- and forward-looking methods pursued by a variety of state and non-state actors. This article s...

The conference series "Beyond Camps and Forced Labor," held at the Imperial War Museum in London in January 2009, brought together European and North American scholars interested in the fate of the survivors of the Second World War. This book, the second volume to result from those conferences, consists of three main sections dealing with postwar j...

This comprehensive three-volume reference work collects and summarizes the wealth of information available in the field of transitional justice. Transitional justice is an emerging domain of inquiry that has gained importance with the regime changes in Latin America after the 1970s, the collapse of the European and Soviet communist regimes in 1989...

Nation- and Statehood in Moldova: Ideological and Political Dynamics since the 1980s. By Zarabah Dareg A. . Balkanologische Veröffentlichungen: Geschichte—Gesellschaft—Kultur, no. 53. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. xii, 212 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Tables. €48.00, paper. - Volume 71 Issue 2 - Lavinia Stan

This chapter overviews the political, social and economic impact of EU accession on Romania, which was accepted as a member state in January 2007. While the examined time frame is rather short, the chapter looks in depth at these aspects.

Lustration was not legislated in Romania to date, but it was discussed by deputies and senators of all ideological persuasions, especially from 2005 to 2007. Declarations delivered in front of the house, interventions during debates of lustration-related draft bills and contributions to a parliament-sponsored public discussion reveal that for Roman...

Since 1989, Romania has adopted a variety of official and unofficial methods redressing the legacy of the communist regime. This is the first volume to overview the complex Romanian transitional justice effort, by investigating court trials of former communist perpetrators, access to secret archives, lustration, compensation and rehabilitation, pro...

Romanian transitional justice – encompassing a handful of trials against Communist leaders, the opening of the secret archives, reforms of the security sector, a Truth Commission, mild lustration, two official apologies, financial compensation, and the restitution of confiscated property in kind – has been reluctantly moved forward by initiatives f...

Five cases in which the names of former secret informers who supplied information to the communist secret political police were unofficially disclosed are discussed in terms of the motivations of their authors, their timing relative to 1989 and their countries’ lustration and file access legislation, and the information they make available to the g...

In November 2010, Romanian legislator Liviu Campanu, representing the governing coa-lition, proposed Daniel Ciobotea as Prime Minister of a cabinet of “national union”. The suggestion was surprising because Ciobotea is leader of the Orthodox Church, accounting for 86.8% of the country‟s population. It would not be the first time when the Orthodox P...

This book studies the relationship between religion and politics in ten former communist Eastern European countries. Challenging widespread theories of increasing secularization, this book argues that in most of these countries, the populations have shown themselves to remain religious even as they embrace modernization and democratization. Church-...