Barbara J Falk

... time to provide very thoughtful and engaging responses; my first and foremost reader and critic, Jules Bloch; Libora Oates-Indruchová for helping me refine my research questions and whose friendship and scholarship knows literally no borders; and finally Zinejda Rita for her ...

It was Vaclav Havel who brilliantly offered a way out of this conundrum in his influential 1979 essay "The power of the powerless" - now translated into many languages and serving as a guide - as much for current dissidents in Iran and Cuba as for their fellows in central and eastern Europe a generation ago. 7 Circulated widely in samizdat among central and east European communities of dissent, Havel pinpointed the birth of, and the possibilities for, dissent within the ranks of the powerless, not within efforts to gain power or influence among the powerful. Admitting that his admonition to "live in truth" and to act against the ideological automatism demanded by the system requires no small level of moral courage and personal risk, Havel nonetheless theorized a way forward. Authoritarian power on some level must rest on dissimulation and the restriction of free expression - undoing it requires acting "as if" these strictures do not exist. This advice still holds today, and is one reason why contemporary communities of dissent are disproportionately over-represented by the ranks of independent and citizen journalists, internet activists, and writers.

Havel's philosophical insight was buttressed by his friends Adam Michnik in Poland and Janos Kis in Hungary, who detailed how dramatic yet piecemeal efforts to undertake peaceful yet radical reform were both possible, probable, and almost inevitable. Tellingly, Michnik dubbed the strategy "new evolutionism"; to Kis a more suitable term was "radical reformism." Together, their experience and collective oeuvre provides us with clear documentation as to how dissent can flourish and yield concrete results.8 I like to call this process "regime change from below," and although it is time consuming and highly dependent on favourable and fortuitous externalities, it is certainly much cheaper and less controversial than recent regime-change operations "from above," such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq. And perhaps most critically, it at best involves no or few civilian or military casualties. One large caveat, however: to be both locally legitimate and effective, it must be home-grown, not primarily imported or paid for from abroad as a crass instrument of hegemonic or regional foreign policy. And in order to be successful it has to be, in the words of the Poles, inherently self limiting. The goal should not be the overthrow of governments per se, but the steady expansion of the zone of independence and expression. It is a strategy of self-effacement, paradoxically yielding tactical results and tangible change.

5 The original hypothesis was proposed by [H. Gordon Skilling] at a meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in June 1965 and later embodied in an article published in World Politics in 1966, which drew considerable criticism from reining Sovietologists, particularly in the US. Skilling and [Franklyn Griffiths] later convened a conference at the University of Toronto in 1968, the outcome of which was their co-edited volume, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). Essentially, Skilling and his colleagues challenged an "informational cascade" regarding the reality of political life in the Soviet Union - see my discussion of [Cass R. Sunstein] below. Later Skilling went beyond a fairly narrow analysis of the potential for pluralism within the "interest group framework" in order both to document the failure of reform -from -above in the Prague spring (which he called the "interrupted" revolution), and to analyze and chronicle dissent in Czechoslovakia. Skilling was remarkably prescient in predicting the importance of dissent with respect to the potential fall of communism, and his work remains an inspiration for contemporary scholars and former students.

In 1949, the leadership of the American Communist Party was put on trial for allegedly conspiring to teach the overthrow of the American government. The case, known as the Dennis trial, is a major part of American political and Cold War history. One of the rarely-discussed aspects of the case, however, is that the defendants argued that the jury was stacked against them: it would be composed almost exclusively of wealthy white men. The defendants' claim of jury discrimination was denied, but it can be seen as a vital step towards reforming New York's "Blue Ribbon Panel" system of jury selection, eventual Congressional legislation to end bias in jury selection, and the slow recognition by the Supreme Court that jury discrimination was more pervasive than previously thought. This Article is the first scholarly effort to explain the nature of the jury challenge in Dennis and situate the defendants' failure as part of a larger narrative of discrimination and injustice. Section II of this Article provides background on the case and establishes its importance as one of the most significant political trials of the twentieth century. Section III traces the evolution of Supreme Court jurisprudence on jury discrimination prior to the Dennis case. Section IV explains the peculiar "Blue Ribbon Panel" system of jury selection used in New York at the time for cases seen by the court system as especially serious or important. Section V dives into the heart of the Dennis defendants' claim that a skewed selection process would result in a jury that was almost wholly white, male, and upper-class. Last, Section VI discusses the aftermath of the Dennis trial and its importance both historically and legally.

World War II generated a series of now-defunct assumptions about how war is produced, fought, and ended. However problematic these assumptions, they have been replicated in popular cultural representations of war – from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan through to Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker – illustrating their tenacity and hold on the contemporary imagination. In reality, military epistemology and ontology must move forward to embrace complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty in contemporary conflict, recognizing the elusive and illusory search for fixed solutions.

Twenty years after the events of 1989, most American academics and policymakers continue to see the end of the Cold War as a victory for the United States. This Cold War “triumphalism” is based on a number of assumptions which have, in turn, served as important framing devices for US foreign policy. This chapter argues that the “wrong lessons” were learned from the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. These lessons were based on a misreading of both Cold War history, in general, and its endgame, more specifically. This chapter outlines ten such lessons and explores the ways in which they were used to legitimate policies of regime change from above after 9/11. In this way, we can see a direct line between Berlin in 1989 and Baghdad in 2003, one driven by the hubris of both US policymakers and intellectuals.

I. Introduction
On October 7, 2001, less than one month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York
and Washington, D.C., the United States commenced conflict operations in
Afghanistan, with the express purpose of removing the Taliban from power and
capturing and destroying al Qaeda leaders, agents, and bases of activity and training.1
By late November, the legal status and treatment of combatants captured in the new
‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) became a matter of international debate and concern.
However, in the succeeding five years, much of the controversy has shifted to the longterm
detention, treatment and legal status of ‘enemy combatants’, particularly those
held in US custody in Guantánamo Bay and other secret detention centers abroad.

This article examines the lessons "learned" and the legacies inherent in the downfall of authoritarian communism in central and eastern Europe in view of post-communism's first decade. It is argued that the events of 1989-1991 were revolutionary in dramatically and unexpectedly establishing new regimes and ushering in simultaneous and multilateral (political, economic, social, national) change. Furthermore, 1989-1991 represents a rejection of "grand narrative" large-scale social experimentation in political arrangements in favour of hybridism and incrementalism. Ten key maxims are introduced as a means of analyzing this historical rupture and understanding the variety of experiences across the region.

This volume discusses one of the major currents leading to the fall of communism. Falk examines the intellectual dissident movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary from the late 1960s through to 1989. In spite of its historic significance, no other comprehensive survey has appeared on the subject.

The author passionately argues that the intellectuals and dissident writers of the region not only contributed mightily to the events themselves, but also collectively bequeathed to the world an oeuvre that constitutes one of the most original, important and useful contributions to political theory today.

Political trials have been common in history, and have taken place in both consolidated democracies that respect the rule of law as well as authoritarian  regimes. As concentrated legal narratives and expressions of political activity, such trials are neither entirely pejorative nor positive. They are  microcosms of a specific political and cultural universe they seek to represent in concentrated legal form, and knowledge of context and the facts of each articular case are paramount. How then can such trials be analyzed and compared? The essay examines the current literature on political trials and argues against a single all-encompassing definition or typology in favour of a non-determinative list of criteria that illustrate how and under what conditions justice is politicized. Such a nuanced understanding of the range and type of factors that politicize trials is important because parallels between the Cold War and the current Global War on Terror indicate that such trials are not a feature of the remote past. Interpreting and applying the criteria suggested here would be helpful in order to recognize the processes of politicization, the didactic value of trials, particularly in situations of political transition.