Paper Short Abstract:

The article analyses the memories and prefigurations of multiple (in-)justices among left-wing agents of 1990s generation in Georgia. Contributing to bottom-up theorizing among ordinary agents, it calls for a revitalization of the anthropological turn in the transitional justice scholarship.

Paper Abstract:

This article analyses the memories and prefigurations of multiple (in-)justices among left-wing agents belonging to the 1990s generation in Georgia. Drawing on a combined methodological framework of discourse theory and critique as social practice, it utilizes ethnographic conversation data (n=20). The empirical material suggests that the category ideology is suitable to structure justice interpretations of past, present and future. Furthermore, the paper showcases that the concepts of spirit, ghost and demon can serve as metaphors for the conceptualization of interlocutors’ transmitted (in-)justice memories about the Soviet Union — that is a symbiotic-affirmative, a symbiotic-negative and an antagonistic relation — and allow to identify thematic and ideological resonance between these distant memories (past), memorialized injustices during post-Soviet politics (present) and imagined visions of justice (future). Contributing to scholarship on bottom-up theorizing among ordinary, critical agents, the article calls for a revitalization of the anthropological turn (Hinton 2011) in the transitional/transformative justice scholarship.