Publicity and Media Revelations from the Archives
from Part III - Public Tribunals of Judgment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2025
The chapter concerns the relatively underexplored relationship between transitional justice, media, and rightwing populism. In particular, the chapter problematizes the boundaries of official Polish lustration and attends to the ways in which lustration has become a site for the counter-hegemonic struggles of rightwing groups against postsocialist liberal establishment. Through a detailed analysis of informal lustration practices such as highly mediatized “agent lists,” ad hoc commissions, and the historical research about the famous worker dissident and later the president of the Polish Republic, Lech Walesa, the chapter shows the ways in which liberal and conservative nationalist groups mobilize legal rights against each other, especially freedom of speech and freedom of academic research and the right to a good name/reputation, in an environment pervaded by sensational modes of publicity and nationalization and privatization of public life, partly driven by postsocialist capitalist transformation of media and communication practices.
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