Starting from a recent series of criminal complaints launched by the Institute for the Research of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile focusing on inhuman treatments committed during state socialism in care homes for disabled children, the proposed research project aims to look at how the judicialization of biopolitical practices has become “democratized”, thus transforming practices of transitional justice. The alleged perpetrators of “crimes of Communism” are no longer primarily party officials or secret service collaborators, but professionals ranging from cleaning staff to heads of children institutions, who are considered responsible for having let “unrecoverable” disabled children die during state socialism. Located at the intersection of transitional justice, biopolitics and humanitarianism, the project seeks to understand this recent transformation through an ethnographic, genealogical and epistemological approach.

A full-length study is available here.