Lecture format: on site
Room: 2Q-EG-27 (Seminar Room of the Institute for Eastern European History).
Street address: Spitalgasse 2,  Campus of the University of Vienna, Hof 3.2

Once proclaimed as the “end of history,” the times we live in are today often described as the end of liberal democracy and international order, and the resurgence of authoritarianism and fascism. “Postwar” reconstruction and “post-conflict” transition, justice, memory, and peace projects, often referred as “transitional justice,” have become subjected to the vagaries of authoritarian capitalist logics. Eastern Europe has been at the center of these developments. Drawing on his recently released book, Moral Autopsy (Cambridge University Press 2025), Saygun Gökarıksel shows how the contentious trajectory of postsocialist transitional justice in Poland, especially, lustration, reveals the fundamental problems of global transitional justice including its capitalist nation-state centrism, Eurocentric liberal teleology of transition, judicialization and de-temporalization of history, and the moral-political vocabulary of transparency, victimhood, and redemption. Revisiting these problems of transitional justice, Gökarıksel argues, is important to enrich our understanding of not only the socialist past, but also the postsocialist transformations and ongoing struggles and problems about “restoring democracy” or “transition” from rightwing authoritarian legalist rules, as in Poland and Hungary.

Saygun Gökarıksel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Situated in Eastern Europe and the Middle East/Western Asia, his research and writing examine the history of socialist internationalism and antifascism, and contemporary authoritarian capitalist politics of postwar reconstruction, memory, and justice processes. In 2022-2023, Gökarıksel was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of Moral Autopsy: Truths, Secrets, and the Judicial Afterlives of Communist Secret Service Archives (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which recently received honorable mention from the Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies of ASEEES. Gökarıksel is a member of the collectives, Red Threads and Nomos: Center for International Research on Law, Culture, and Power, based in Krakow. His writings have appeared in journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Critique, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Dialectical Anthropology.