March 1998 - Latvia will hold its next parliamentary elections in October 1998. How will the political left fare? Given the social and economic travails of the post-Communist period (the radical drop in living standards, the plight of those on fixed incomes, the loss of status of the cultural intelligentsia), one might predict that the left would score successes. Since 1991, however, the political left has seemed almost quiescent in Latvian politics. The parties of the left in the renewed parliament (Saeima) have controlled at best only about a third of all seats, and only one of these leftist parties received a plurality in the last Saeima elections in 1995. Why is this so? The political left in Latvia has not succeeded because it has not come to grips with six dilemmas-or, better said, problems with equally unsatisfying solutions. more

December 2008 - In December 2008, a friend in Bucharest sent me a message quoting a recent statement by an influential political commentator from the Romanian media. This columnist reminds me of the former spokesman for the Polish military junta in the 1980s, who has since become a very successful capitalist: Jerzy Urban. Urban is the editor of the weekly magazine Nie, which irreverently makes fun of everybody. In my mind, Urban is no hero, but is a former Communist Party lackey who turned into the transition's profiteering buffoon. So, I am referring here to somebody who is the equivalent of Urban in Romania, and his name is Ion Cristoiu. more

May 1997 - One of the weakest aspects of Polish democracy, according to Marian Krzaklewski, Chair of the Solidarity trade union and leader of Akcja Wyborcza Solidarnosc (AWS--Solidarity Electoral Action Coalition), has been the inability of the post-Solidarity political parties to maintain a united front. Eight years after the collapse of Communism, the "destructive diffusion" of these groups has inhibited the creation of a well-defined political landscape and has left Poland's former Communists in control of the country. more

October 2007 - Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a marked rise in support for the international prosecution of leaders involved in some of the most heinous human rights violations. This process began with the two ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (1993) and Rwanda (1995) and continued into the new century with the UN's Special Court for Sierra Leone (2002) and efforts to launch similar international prosecutions in other states such as Cambodia (2003) and Iraq (2005). In all but the latter case, criminal prosecutions were launched by international authorities relying on the non-coerced cooperation of leaders in sovereign states. As a result, transitional justice has become an important issue in these countries' bilateral and multilateral relations. The establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2003 suggests that the international diplomacy of transitional justice is not merely a fad but instead may become a staple. more