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2 - Democracy Must Be Defended

Sovereignty, Property, Security

from Part I - Contextualizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 November 2025

Saygun Gökarıksel
Affiliation:
Boğaziçi University, Istanbul
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Summary

The chapter examines the relatively underexplored relations of property, sovereignty, and security underlying transitional justice by focusing on the national and “European” legal space of Polish lustration and postsocialist Eastern European transitional justice more generally from a critical legal and social-materialist perspective. The chapter offers an analysis of the key European resolutions, the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, the legal doctrine of “militant democracy,” and the landmark verdicts of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal concerning lustration. In particular, this analysis critically interrogates the public–private distribution of responsibility, the problem of corporate sovereignty and immunity, and the authoritarian logic of security underpinning neoliberal and liberal capitalist citizenship. While highlighting the importance of the interdependence of legal rights and struggles, the chapter urges us to go beyond the binary of liberalism and authoritarianism and attend to the ways in which rightwing authoritarian populism grows out of liberal legal and capitalist institutions and frameworks.

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