How to Deal with Unrecognized Regimes? The Necessity of the Implementation of Transitional Justice Mechanisms in a Context of Frozen Conflicts and de facto Regimes in the Post-USSR Space
How to Deal with Unrecognized Regimes? The Necessity of the Implementation of Transitional Justice Mechanisms in a Context of Frozen Conflicts and de facto Regimes in the Post-USSR Space

Summary/Abstract: Transitional justice discourse rarely touches the issue of unrecognized states (regimes de facto), namely those located in the post-Soviet space. Needless to say, the disintegration of the USSR in the early 1990s led to the establishment of numerous ‘new’ states in the Eastern Europe and many bloody conflicts as those between Georgia and Abkhazia, Moldova and Transnistria, or Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. All of them have their strong geopolitical and legal implications until today. The paper explores the issue of the so-called 'quasi-states' in the post-Soviet area, such as Transnistria (formally the integral part of Moldova), Abkhazia (legally speaking the Georgian territory) and the new de facto regimes within Ukraine (‘Donetsk’ and ‘Luhansk People’s Republics’, based in Donbas) in a context of transitional justice tool-kit. It is argued that post-violence instruments shall go hand-in-hand with the diplomatic or (even) military means in a case of abovementioned examples. Backward-looking justice needs to be strengthened by forward-looking mechanisms, especially by the use of institutional reform paradigm, demobilization and reintegration of the quasi-states. This study is based on a socio-legal methodology and a subsidiary field-research conducted during visits to Ukraine, Moldova (Transnistria) and Georgia (Abkhazia).

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