TY - JOUR
AU - Mälksoo, Maria
AB - Abstract How does an approach towards transitional justice produce preconditions for a country's international action, enabling certain policies and practices in the immediate neighborhood and international society at large? This article unpacks ontological security-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics, which makes it possible to productively conceptualize the connection between a state's transitional justice and foreign policies. Going beyond the dichotomy of transitional justice compliance and noncompliance by gauging the role of states’ subjective sense of self in driving their behavior, I develop an analytical framework to explain how state ontological security-seeking relates to major transitions and consequent state identity disjuncture, the ensuing politics of truth-and-justice-seeking, and its international resonance in framing and executing particular foreign policies. I offer a typology of the international consequences of states’ transitional justice politics, distinguishing between reflective and mnemonical security-oriented approaches, spawning cooperative and conflictual foreign policy behavior, respectively. The empirical purchase of the purported nexus is illustrated with the example of post-Soviet Russia's limited politics of accountability toward the repressions of its antecedent regime and its increasingly self-assertive and confrontational stance in contemporary international politics. foreign policy, inefficient causation, ontological security, Russia, transitional justice Transitional justice (TJ) is a multidisciplinary approach to redressing past human rights violations and international crimes in the postconflict or post-authoritarian/-totalitarian setting through a variety of judicial and nonjudicial means of accountability. The discourse on TJ has gained global normative proportions over the past two decades, and its mechanisms have become increasingly institutionalized as general obligations of accountability for the past, required as a matter of constitutional and/or international law (Teitel 2014, 181; Ben-Josef Hirsch 2014). The United Nations (UN) endorses the “right to the truth,” affirming that “[e]very people has the inalienable right to know the truth about past events concerning the perpetration of heinous crimes and about the circumstances and reasons that led, through massive or systematic violations, to the perpetration of those crimes” (UN 2005). Measures, such as truth commissions, have spread worldwide and become institutionalized at the international level and by major nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Center for Transitional Justice) (Ben-Josef Hirsch 2014). International TJ advocacy has significantly broadened its scope from mechanisms dealing with past violence to postconflict peace accords, ushering in democracy, rule of law, and a culture of human rights (Subotić 2012). An emerging general obligation of accountability for the past should theoretically have concrete policy implications for individual states. However, states remain bound by the allegedly global normative imperative to reckon with their past human rights abuses and international crimes to vastly varying degrees in practice. While compartments of literature have addressed case-specific bilateral and regional ripples of individual truth-and-justice-seeking measures (e.g., Gardner Feldman 2012), the connection between states’ (non-)adoption of particular TJ measures domestically and their foreign policies remains yet to be systematically conceptualized. This article outlines a novel analytical framework for linking states’ politics of truth-and-justice-seeking with their foreign policy discourse and practice. What is the meaning and function of a state's reckoning with the antecedent regime's human rights violations for its international conduct? How does a state's adoption or non-adoption of (a core set of) TJ measures influence its international outlook and foreign policy? And how is a state's TJ politics affected by its self-perceived position in the international society in turn? Addressing these questions continues the extensive conversation in IR on the international effects and sources of domestic politics (the “Second Image” and the “Second Image Reversed,” Gourevitch 1978), while acknowledging the difficult balancing act of states between domestic and international imperatives. Ontological security-seeking, I argue, makes it possible to productively conceptualize the connection and synergy between states’ TJ and foreign policies. The concept of ontological security (OS) has traveled along the customary disciplinary trajectory from social theory (Giddens 1991; see also Laing 1960) to international relations (IR), wherein the applications and critical engagements thereof have produced a rich and growing literature (see particularly Huysmans 1998; Kinnvall 2004; Lupovici 2012, 2016; Mitzen 2006; Steele 2008; Rumelili 2015a, 2015b; Subotić 2016; “Ontological Securities in World Politics” 2017). In IR applications of this notion, OS signifies a sense of a continuous and stable self (as a society or a state), having that sense confirmed by others, and being thus reassured about one's own continuity in the world. TJ as a particular international normative domain entails specific challenges to a state's continuous sense of self and is, therefore, consequential for state behavior. I bring together the deepened and broadened understanding of cause (Kurki 2008), interpretive process tracing (Guzzini 2012, 2017), and inefficient causation (Lebow 2014) in order to unpack OS-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics, accounting for the causal relationship between TJ as a set of international normative expectations and foreign policy as state behavior. Proceeding from the assumption that the emerging global normative expectations related to the states’ duty to come to terms with their violent legacies (Teitel 2014) present distinctive challenges to the sustenance of their continuous sense of self, I develop an analytical framework in order to explain how state OS-seeking (i) relates to major transitions and consequent state identity disjuncture; (ii) the politics of truth-and-justice-seeking ensuing from a state's “diagnosis” of the transition in question and its related grappling with various pressures on its continuity;1 and (iii) the international resonance of the chosen TJ policies in a state's pursuance of specific notions of order and justice in international politics. Interlinking the adoption of particular TJ measures and state OS-seeking in international politics improves both the understanding of system-level conditions enabling or constraining state's reckoning with the antecedent regime's legacy and the international implications of the chosen politics of truth-and-justice-seeking. The admittance that the overall knowledge on even just the state-level effects of TJ still remains “insufficient” (Thoms et al. 2010) does not curb my main objective to pinpoint a basic typology of the international consequences of states’ TJ politics. The article brings a state's approach to TJ; its security/foreign policy imaginary, or a “structure of well-established meanings and social relations out of which representations about the world of international relations are created” (Weldes 1999, 10); and consequent practices into a loop of mutual dependence and productivity. My aim is to operationalize OS-seeking by developing pointers for empirical analysis, highlighting the distinct challenges created by fundamental transitions for states’ normative and spatial continuity and their subsequent autobiographical narratives thereof. I offer a simple taxonomy of pursuing the politics of truth-and-justice-seeking in “transition states,” distinguishing between reflective and mnemonical security-oriented approaches. The former tends to contribute toward a more systematic and comprehensive adoption of a range of TJ measures, laying, in turn, the basis for a more cooperative stance in a state's foreign policy outlook. The mnemonical security-orientation of a state, however, seeks to fix certain understandings of the past in social memory in order to keep a particular perception of the state's past self intact and secure for the present needs (Mälksoo 2015a, 222). If a state's dealing with its repressive legacies is geared toward the safeguarding and securitization of its glorious memories and “useful past” at the expense of engaging with the more problematic chapters in its history, self-interrogation and reflectiveness tend to be actively discouraged, and the adoption of TJ measures remains limited or highly selective. The calls to revisit a state's past self are thus resisted, the alternative approaches depicted as dangerous and undermining for the state's sense of ontological continuity, leading eventually to a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis the perceived challengers of the state's dominant self-narrative in international society.2 The suggested framework has major policy implications. The mnemonical security-orientation of influential state actors may incentivize international TJ norm entrepreneurs to tone down pressures for state accountability for historical (and more recent) crimes as a way to avoid counterproductive overreactions on the part of the said state and to open up space for concessions on other relevant policy issues. Such strategic action on the part of international TJ advocates does not make it possible to evade the fundamental question about the ethics of dealing with the past, however. A reflective approach to TJ embraces what Viet Thanh Nguyen (2013, 2016) calls “ethical memory”—memory work that recalls both one's own and others by recognizing the concurrent humanity and inhumanity in one's self and the “others.” Since such memory work is more conducive to international relations based on mutual empathy and understanding, a reflective approach to TJ should logically be at the heart of the respective normative persuasion attempts of global TJ norm entrepreneurs. I delineate my points in the three substantive parts of this article. In the first, I outline the rationale for moving beyond the rationalist cost-benefit calculation in accounting for why and how states engage with global norms. As a counterpoint to the literature on the instrumental use of norms, an OS-based framework sheds light on the occasionally conflicting calls of states’ identity maintenance and status-seeking in their engagement with TJ. Next, I lay out a conceptual and methodological framework for studying the relationship between state's TJ and foreign policies, with OS-seeking as a causal mechanism linking the two in an interpretivist process (cf. Guzzini 2017). In the third part, the TJ and foreign policy nexus is illustrated with the example of post-Soviet Russia's limited politics of accountability toward the repressions of its antecedent regime and its increasingly self-assertive and confrontational stance in contemporary international politics. The conclusion recaps the contributions of the article and points at some avenues for further research. A Case for an Ontological Security Perspective TJ has emerged as a “global project”—a body of customary international law and a set of normative standards (Nagy 2008, 276). A constructivist take on norms as “standards of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity” implies a moral obligation, enabling (albeit not determining) a particular behavior (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 891; Snyder and Vinjamuri 2003/04, 8). The patchy application of the alleged normative duty to undergo TJ by important states (such as Russia) calls for probing the role of a state's perceived standing and unique power3 position during and after the transition.4 Scholars have shown how states’ distinct rankings in various social and normative hierarchies expose states to the constraints and demands of specific international norms to different degrees (Towns and Rumelili 2017). Others have highlighted how leaders’ legal justifications regarding particular international norms and their favored principles “cannot be divorced from wider conceptions of position, status, and recognition within the international system” (Allison 2013, 10). States’ adherence to an international norm, emergent or consolidated, might furthermore be bounded by the governing elites’ fears of compromising state sovereignty or resistance from a domestic populace (Cortell and Davis 2000, 74–75; cf. Mälksoo 2015). Two streams of scholarship in particular have made important advances in problematizing norm diffusion as top-down international socialization. The literature on the instrumental use of norms highlights how international norms can be adhered to, and used, in order to achieve certain policy goals or to shape the content of the norm itself (Dixon 2017). States use normative manipulation and mimicry (Hyde 2011); join treaties for self-interested reasons rather than due to deep identification with constituent obligations (Bower 2015, 353); and engage in transnational “norm proxy wars” to undermine increasingly hegemonic, yet internally contested, human rights norms (Sanders 2016). Dixon (2017) shows that beyond simply complying with or violating a norm, states’ responses to international norms can vary from contestation, resistance, and (seeming) compliance in multiple ways. Whether actors regard a norm as strong or weak and the type of rhetorical adaptation they consequently employ, ranging from norm disregard to norm avoidance, norm interpretation, or norm signaling, considerably improves the understanding of how states might seek to avoid charges of norm violation or to resist pressures for compliance (Dixon 2017, 83–84). Meanwhile, an alternative framework provided by Zarakol (2014) has significantly deepened our understanding of why such behavior might occur (cf. Epstein 2012). Offering an important caveat for Risse and Sikkink's (1999) international socialization model for understanding the domestic adaptation and internalization of international norms, Zarakol puts forth a persuasive argument for figuring out both norm-compliance and norm-rejection by non-Western states (including Russia) through the dynamic of stigmatization instead. Modern international society has accordingly been fundamentally shaped by stigmatization as non-Westerners joined the system at a disadvantage (regardless of their formally colonized status in history) with major consequences for their modern national narratives and state identities (Zarakol 2014, 312–13). In case of stigmatization, or the “internalisation of a particular normative standard that defines one's own attributes as undesirable” (Zarakol 2014, 314), the response of the norm-taker “is much more likely to be failed attempts at correction, overcompensation, or a stubborn denial that a problem exists” (Zarakol 2014, 317). These insights on norm takers’ logic of action provide a stepping stone for an OS framework developed here. An OS perspective assumes that states do not just seek to survive and surpass: they want to persist as particular kind of actors. Rationalist explanations generally underestimate the centrality of norm-takers’ sense of self for intentional action. Identity is deemed a given functional asset in a strategic exchange rather than a constitutive feature of state preferences, and the “self” in self-interest is largely left unengaged. However, assuming that social action and interaction are fundamentally constituted by actors’ striving for a stable self-understanding and a consistent subject-position, points at the more profound identity costs related to the expectations about coming to terms with one's past (Zarakol 2010, 7). A rationalist perspective can factor in the political costs of going against the grain of the TJ norm, but it reaches a limit in accounting for the ontological costs related to the pressures to revise a particular definition of the state self. While minimizing the disturbance of identity ruptures might in principle be subjected to cost-benefit calculations, state identity sustenance requirements can contradict, and arguably outweigh, conventionally conceived material interests. An OS framework highlights that the use of norms for instrumental ends does not happen independently of states’ subjective sense of self: it is bound by states’ historical sensitivities toward the particular origin of norms, with related status anxieties and recognition-seeking (Zarakol 2014). It is therefore crucial to gauge how a state's sense of self interacts with the emerging TJ norm and to what effect. Bringing under scrutiny norm-takers’ intersubjective meanings of the duty to come to terms with one's past, an OS framework adds causal depth to states’ TJ engagement, shedding light on the ontological costs of reckoning with past crimes for states undergoing fundamental identity ruptures. An instrumental approach and an OS-based perspective can converge on the adoption of specific TJ measures, not necessarily indicating the internalization of the norm. The seeming compliance with the international expectation to come to terms with one's violent and repressive past could amount to emulation and, in fact, substantive contestation of the respective norm (Mälksoo 2015b). An instrumental approach and an OS-centric perspective diverge on the ontological premises of why such behavior might occur and on allocating relatively different importance on state identity management needs for its stable agency. As an analytic venture, an OS framework on TJ norm-engagement is more attentive to the historical development of state preferences and identities, allowing for a nuanced and comprehensive appraisal of the social dimensions of states’ international behavior. It can further point to different explanations: while, at times, states’ OS-seeking can resonate with the strategic logic of adhering to particular TJ-related normative expectations, it can decisively deviate from the pursuance of material interests in norm compliance at others. Engaging an OS perspective on states’ responses to international norms thus adds a critical counterpoint to the scholarship on how states instrumentally manipulate, use, and change norms beyond the consequentialist means and ends calculations about a conventionally presumed state interest. The case of post-Soviet Russia illuminates the role of historical memory in the OS-seeking struggles of states caught between the liberal premises of the allegedly globalizing norm of coming to terms with one's past and a quest for sustaining a continuous self-concept as a great power, regardless of the mismatch between the traditional and contemporary normative connotations attached to it (Neumann 2005). The anxiety about, and resistance to the full-blown adoption of the TJ norm in the Russian case is simultaneously expressive of the country's self-consciousness and contestation of its historically ostracized position in the modern international society.5 Yet, we do not know sufficiently about the processes and mechanisms whereby state's identity interacts with the emerging general obligation of accountability for the past, and the consequent policy effects of such interaction. Extrapolating from the existing literature on the nature of the connection between historical memory, TJ and foreign policy, the effects of historical memory on international relations range from indirect (through shaping identities and values that the foreign policy makers bring into the process of decision-making) to concrete historical “lessons” and analogies drawn on in making a particular foreign policy decision (Müller 2002; Lebow, Kansteiner, Fogu 2006; Olick 2007; Langenbacher 2010, 38–39). The impact of historical memory on the international behavior of states has been studied in extensive detail in the contexts of post–Second World War Germany and Japan (e.g., Berger 2012; Gardner Feldman 2012; Lind 2008; Buruma 1994; Hagström 2015; Gustafsson 2016). These cases are generally quoted as examples revealing the connection between countries’ ways of coming to terms with past violence and the prospects for international reconciliation. This connection is not straightforward, however, as Lind's (2008) study on international apologies and their potential domestic backlashes has demonstrated. While contrition is likely to reduce threat perception and promote reconciliation, apologies are not prerequisites of international reconciliation. Forgetting, denying, or glorifying past atrocities nonetheless tends to elevate threat perception and inhibit reconciliation in international relations, as such practices signal contempt for victimized country's people, its status in international society, and the future of the bilateral relationship between the former perpetrator and victim state (Lind 2008, 9, 13). I propose OS-seeking as a causal mechanism for explaining the complex interplay between external pressures and internal demands on state's sense of self in order to account for the relationship and synergy between state's TJ and foreign policy. In IR applications of OS theory, states are presumed to seek a stable sense of self to realize their continuous agency. For states in transition, global normative expectations related to TJ challenge an urge to sustain the continuity of the known state self. Unpacking the ways a state's TJ politics is entangled with its status concerns and the related search for recognition of its preferred international standing thus becomes paramount for substantiating the TJ-foreign policy nexus. The Transitional Justice and Foreign Policy Nexus This section outlines an analytical framework for a systematic study of the conditioning causal power of a state's approach to TJ over its foreign policy discourses and international action. I contend that foreign policy can be explained by examining in depth the adoption or non-adoption of the alleged duty to come to terms with one's violent past in the domestic context. A state's way of approaching TJ also has wider repercussions for the regional dynamics of the TJ norm, hence broadening the scope of possible international implications of particular domestic applications of TJ. The proposed approach is rooted in the interpretivist tradition. It highlights the importance of a deeply contextual understanding of a state's adoption or non-adoption of particular TJ measures6 domestically ex-ante linking its truth-and-justice-seeking profile to its international outlook and foreign policy behavior (cf. Guzzini 2012b, 48). Methodologically, the suggested framework underlines the importance of looking closely into the reasoning provided by the political leadership for the dismissal of particular TJ policies. It also emphasizes the acknowledgement of the broader societal debates on which TJ measures would actually be desirable and which are allegedly counterproductive for the “healing” and “moving on” of the state and society in question (taking notice of the potential incompatibility of these goals). As these choices illuminate the state's understandings of human rights, rule of law, the desired relationship between state and society, the normative convergence or divergence from the expectations of the emerging norm of TJ, and, relatedly, the perceived place of the country in international society, they have fundamental foreign policy implications. Let us dissect each element in the proposed analytical framework in turn. First, some parameters of OS need to be clarified in order to make the concept more operative. Somers's (1994, 618–19) highlighting of the ontological narratives (referring to who we are and laying the basis for consequent action) and public narratives (the intersubjective webs of relationality) provides helpful guidance here. Delineating the mnemonic dimension in a (i) state's biographical narrative (the backbone of its OS narration), and drawing attention to (ii) the narratives of transition, in particular, yields a more comprehensive and convincing analytical framework for examining the international implications of a state's adopted TJ package than the existing accounts. To operationalize a state's quest for its continuous sense of self in international society, a thoroughgoing examination of the formation and representations of the state's biographical narrative in political, academic, and public discourses should be undertaken first. The biographical narrative is of central importance for state identity “because it is the locus through which agents ‘work out’ their understanding of social settings and the placement of their Selves in those settings” (Steele 2008, 7). As endogenous identity-formation processes at the domestic level are deeply intertwined with the engagement and reflection over the pertinent discursive framings by the outside actors, the configuration of a state's “I” and “me” is entangled to the extent not to warrant an attempt at their analytical distinction (cf. Hopf 2002). The biographical narratives of states thus emerge in perpetual interaction with international society (layer I in Figure 1), for the biographical continuity of state “selves” is incomplete without some sense of external affirmation, intersubjective support, and recognition (Kinnvall and Mitzen 2017, 4). Reminiscent of the discourses-versus-practices debate in IR, the intra- and intersubjective approaches to the constitution of state identity, or internal and external dynamics-driven understandings of OS, are thus more like two sides of the same coin rather than fundamentally opposing takes on the issue. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide State ontological security-seeking in case of a major disjuncture in self-concept The stories states tell about themselves are not “just stories”—they have concrete behavioral consequences. Identities are both told and enacted. A state's biographical narrative constitutes and maintains its self, giving life to routinized foreign policy actions, for states allegedly seek consistency between their self-identity narratives and their behavior in international politics (Steele 2008, 3, 11). States’ self-narratives and practices send signals about their intentions to their international counterparts. Accordingly, both what is being said (in the respective policy documents, speeches by political leaders and elites, public announcements, political memoirs, academic accounts, and the media) and actually done (policies, institutionalization, routines, practices) should be explored in conjunction, highlighting specific reasoning and legitimation moves along the way (cf. Dunn 2006). Fundamental political, economic, and/or ideological transitions present specific challenges for maintaining state continuity and the consistency of its self-concept (layer II in Figure 1). Such transitions meet Ejdus's (2017, 10) criteria of radical self-identity ruptures, as they generate anxiety about the unreliability of international order, the political finitude of the collective “self,” the impermanence of relationships with significant others, and the inconsistency of collective autobiographies of actors going through a critical situation. To understand a state's OS-seeking against the backdrop of a major regime transition and the related expectations to “come to terms with the past,” we need to break down its biographical narrative further, considering the particular challenges presented for a state's normative and spatial continuity, respectively. If the purpose of a biographical narrative is “to meaningfully situate the Self and delineate its existence in time and space, to provide us with a necessary sense of orientation about where we come from, and where we are, or could be, going” (Berenskoetter 2014, 269), the maintenance of the mnemonic backbone linking state's former and emerging selves within its biographical narrative becomes of key significance. As agents are deemed to be geared at achieving coherence between their biographical narratives and positive self-conceptions at the highest level possible (Flockhart 2016, 816), facing up to the negative legacies of one's past creates tension and likely reluctance. State's mnemonic self-vision might be called into question and destabilized by the process of “coming to terms with the past” (Mälksoo 2015a, 224). The normative expectations related to the adoption of TJ measures could subsequently emerge as identity threats of a specific kind (layer III in Figure 1) (cf. “normative threats,” Creppell 2011). Spatial dismembering of the state further adds to the anxiety about the collective political finitude, critically unsettling the identity of the actor in question (Ejdus 2017, 7–8). Critical situations that lead to a major disjuncture in state's self-concept (layer II in Figure 1) demonstrate the closely intertwined nature of various aspects of state OS (e.g., feeling at home in the world or experiencing the shattering of the basic trust vis-à-vis international society; the biographical continuity of the state, and its particular role identity; its self-perceived position within international society and the relationship with others) (Ejdus 2017, 11). Subsequently, (ii) the stories that states (and societies) tell about their experiences of the fundamental transitions in the life of the collective self come into focus. Narratives of transition are important to consider for they illuminate the struggles related to the revision of the core biographical narrative of the state in the context of a major upheaval and change. They also shed light on the TJ choices a state makes, as these narratives build a connection between a political community's past and its future by constructing a particular normative relation. In that sense, “[t]ransitional histories are not ‘meta’-narratives but ‘mini’-narratives, always situated within the state's preexisting national story” (Teitel 2014, 109). Establishing the link between a state's (ii) transitional narratives and its approach toward TJ (A. in Figure 1) logically follows. Unpacking a state's application of particular TJ measures in combination with the close examination of its transitional narratives provides a useful window for reading the self-conceptualization of the state in question. I understand “foreign policy” as a combination of a state's self-vision and its vision of its place in the world, entailing its foreign policy doctrine, a wider foreign policy/security imaginary (Weldes 1999; Guzzini 2012b), and the consequent international practices. Foreign policy thus conceived refers both to the basic defense of a particular notion of the state's self within international society, as well as the normative projection of a state's values and ideas at the international level. Pressures emanating from TJ as a global normative realm, amplified by spatial disruptions in cases of state death (layer III in Figure 1), call for concrete responses to alleviate the anxieties related to the disruption of the collective's sense of OS. These responses might entail rigid attachment to old routines, at times at the expense of collective actors’ material interests or, in extreme cases, even their physical security (Mitzen 2006). In situations of “ontological dissonance,” in which various distinct state identities are simultaneously threatened and the necessary mitigating measures of each of the threatened identities are at odds, the resulting identity dilemma might make avoidance the policy of choice for the collective actor (Lupovici 2012). TJ as a normative environment triggers a discursive sense-making process whereby challenged identities need to be acknowledged and the actor's “dominant voice” advanced, in support of the state's central biographical narrative (Lupovici 2012, 815). Yet, and similarly to denial of historical crimes as a defensive measure to sustain a particular state identity (Zarakol 2010), avoidance tends to perpetuate and sustain conflicts. As a coping mechanism, while facing discrete ontological insecurities, avoidance may impair an actor's openness to new information and its ability to engage with it (Lupovici 2012, 811). Analyzing the reasons provided for the adoption or non-adoption of specific truth-and-justice-seeking measures accordingly makes it possible to track the emergence and dynamics of transitioning state identity and the state's attempted management of ontological dissonance and identity dilemmas. If a state's autobiographical narrative as an OS marker is deemed unengageable, amplifying on another (e.g., a particular role identity, status-seeking in international society) might emerge as a compensatory move. A state's externalization of its OS-seeking thus makes it possible to hold at bay the anxiety-generating idea of having to face up to its past self. This, in turn, contributes toward a sociologically rich and thick understanding of the sources of the states’ international conduct. Observing the impact of a state's TJ politics on its foreign policy engages with deeper causal ontology of the emergence and evolution of state foreign policy. With Kurki (2008, 252), I take the domestic and international levels to be ontologically intertwined, or fundamentally connected, and, therefore, also, analytically, not so clearly separable levels of analysis in international politics. The hypothesized causal relationship between a state's TJ and foreign policies is consequently not implied as a single mono-causality in the empiricist-positivist tradition of conceptualizing causation. The methodology advocated here thus reaches beyond establishing regularities between independent and dependent variables and seeks to engage in more sociologically and historically grounded interpretive analysis of causal relations (Kurki 2008, 272). It proceeds from an understanding that different causes of a state's foreign policy conduct are deeply intertwined. Therefore, the active powers of agents (or the so-called efficient causes) need to be related to final causes (purposes and reasoning provided by actors, the analysis of their intentionality) and contextualized within the “constitutive” conditioning causal powers of rules and norms as well as material conditions (Kurki 2008, 296–97). The causal effect of a state's truth-and-justice-seeking policies on its foreign policy are hypothesized to follow most closely the logic of Aristotelian formal causes, that is, structures, ideas, rules, norms, or, generally, “ways of thinking” “according to which social life is made” (for instance, by the agents’ forming of their identities, intentions, decisions, and actions). This effect is thus distinct from that of material conditions (“out of”) as well as from the extrinsic causes, such as efficient (actor/action “by which”) and final causes (reason/purpose “for the sake of”) (Kurki 2008, 220–24). The causal relationship between a state's TJ and foreign policies could thus be described as of a “constraining and enabling” type, rather than an active “pushing and pulling” kind (Kurki 2008, 225). In the spirit of “how” causality (Vennesson 2008, 232), this approach entails determining how the adoption or non-adoption of various TJ measures is causal for a state's international outlook and behavior, as well as concrete foreign policies in particular areas, and how reckoning with the antecedent regime's human rights violations interacts with other causal forces affecting a state's foreign policy. Methodologically, accounting for the causal effects of a state's TJ politics on its foreign policy thus needs to be deeply and thickly contextualized with the analytical tools of poststructuralist discourse analysis (Hansen 2006; Hopf 2002) and interpretive process-tracing (Guzzini 2011, 2012). The advantage of discourse analysis relies in its ability to avoid the anthropomorphization of the state and the difficulties of translating emotions from the individual to the state level (Morozov 2015, 60). Interpretive process-tracing, in its turn, takes the diverse interpretations actors themselves give to their state identity disjuncture (shaping consequently both state's truth-and-justice-seeking and foreign policies) as the starting point of the analysis. Careful empirical checking of how particular inputs have become translated into policy responses makes it possible to control the risk of equifinality and spurious relationships (Guzzini 2012a, 4). This could be done by adopting Lebow's (2014) model of inefficient causation—a multistep searching for connections between and among causes at multiple levels of inquiry. As an elaboration of singular causation, Lebow's approach offers a detailed variation on the theme of how-causality, seeking to account for how various frames of reference, processes, mechanisms, and other features of context (such as confluences, actor goals, and interactions) may be responsible for particular outcomes (Lebow 2014, 65). Importantly, this kind of causal analysis is wary of determining a single, original cause for specific outcomes. Causes remain hypothesized as, at the end of the day, “there is no way of effectively establishing causation” (Lebow 2014, 144). Inefficient causation therefore aims at developing “layered accounts of human behavior in lieu of law-like statements,” highlighting that outcomes (along with their meanings) are context dependent (Lebow 2014, 146; Guzzini 2015). This framework makes it possible to provide a deep qualitative reconstruction of a state's evolution in the field of TJ, with a focus on the meanings that agents attach to the social reality. Actors’ own justifications of their conduct are key for understanding their foreign policy actions and state's international practice. This approach resonates with Pouliot's “sobjectivist” methodology (Pouliot 2007, 360), combining induction (in order to recover subjective meanings), the objectification of meanings in their intersubjective context, and their setting in motion through historicization. The mechanism of OS-seeking in the TJ and foreign policy nexus is hence not causal in a deterministic sense. The “triggering effect” on a mechanism (Guzzini 2017) may be amplified by the actor's sensitivity to intersubjective pressures and historical stigmatization (Zarakol 2010), its late entrance to international society (Zarakol 2011), significant loss of territory along with the fundamental disruption of the long-ingrained normative ideals, and status anxieties unleashed by the actor's fundamentally shifted position in the international system (cf. “peace anxieties,” Rumelili 2015b). While the pursuit of OS is arguably central to the human condition (Browning 2016, 161), the strategies of aspiring to a sense of OS can significantly vary, with major consequences for states’ predisposition for cooperation or confrontation in their foreign policies. The proposed framework anticipates two crude models of pursuing the politics of truth-and-justice-seeking in “transitional states”: (A1.) a reflective, and (A2.) a mnemonical security-oriented approach (as outlined in Table 1). While these ideal types naturally have significant variations in practice, they are still useful pointers for understanding the basic ways of handling the past by states in transition. Whereas I consider OS-seeking to be a broadly generalizable dynamic informing states’ engagement with the emerging norm of TJ, states’ embracing of the norm in practice, and the related international ripple effects vary depending on the actors’ position in and navigation of various social, normative, and material rankings. Presumably, pursuing a blatantly mnemonic security-oriented approach in relation to coming to terms with historical human rights abuses and international wrongdoings is more readily observable in relatively weighty states with more distant historical issues and a larger perceived “wiggle room” for noncompliance (e.g., Russia, Turkey, Japan, and Israel). The foreign policy effects of the proposed framework could be less palpable in the immediate postconflict cases, susceptible to considerably stronger pressures by the international community to abide by the expectations to undergo TJ (e.g., former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Liberia). Table 1. A simplified matrix of the TJ and foreign policy nexus A. Approach to TJ . A1. Reflective . A2. Mnemonical security-oriented . Systematic and reflective adoption of various TJ measures along the criminal-judicial, political-administrative and symbolic-representational truth-and-justice-seeking axis. Limited adoption or dismissal of most TJ measures along the criminal-judicial, political-administrative and symbolic-representational truth-and-justice-seeking axis. B. Foreign policy B1. Self-reflexive B2. Self-assertive Readiness to cope with change, more creative and innovative outlook of the world, leading to a generally cooperation-prone stance in the international society. Securitizing one's vision of the past, leading to a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis the perceived challengers of the state's dominant self-narrative in international society. A. Approach to TJ . A1. Reflective . A2. Mnemonical security-oriented . Systematic and reflective adoption of various TJ measures along the criminal-judicial, political-administrative and symbolic-representational truth-and-justice-seeking axis. Limited adoption or dismissal of most TJ measures along the criminal-judicial, political-administrative and symbolic-representational truth-and-justice-seeking axis. B. Foreign policy B1. Self-reflexive B2. Self-assertive Readiness to cope with change, more creative and innovative outlook of the world, leading to a generally cooperation-prone stance in the international society. Securitizing one's vision of the past, leading to a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis the perceived challengers of the state's dominant self-narrative in international society. Open in new tab Table 1. A simplified matrix of the TJ and foreign policy nexus A. Approach to TJ . A1. Reflective . A2. Mnemonical security-oriented . Systematic and reflective adoption of various TJ measures along the criminal-judicial, political-administrative and symbolic-representational truth-and-justice-seeking axis. Limited adoption or dismissal of most TJ measures along the criminal-judicial, political-administrative and symbolic-representational truth-and-justice-seeking axis. B. Foreign policy B1. Self-reflexive B2. Self-assertive Readiness to cope with change, more creative and innovative outlook of the world, leading to a generally cooperation-prone stance in the international society. Securitizing one's vision of the past, leading to a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis the perceived challengers of the state's dominant self-narrative in international society. A. Approach to TJ . A1. Reflective . A2. Mnemonical security-oriented . Systematic and reflective adoption of various TJ measures along the criminal-judicial, political-administrative and symbolic-representational truth-and-justice-seeking axis. Limited adoption or dismissal of most TJ measures along the criminal-judicial, political-administrative and symbolic-representational truth-and-justice-seeking axis. B. Foreign policy B1. Self-reflexive B2. Self-assertive Readiness to cope with change, more creative and innovative outlook of the world, leading to a generally cooperation-prone stance in the international society. Securitizing one's vision of the past, leading to a more confrontational stance vis-à-vis the perceived challengers of the state's dominant self-narrative in international society. Open in new tab Theoretically, the anxiety unleashed by critical situations may constitute the emotional turning point that “translates the unassimilable information into cognitive shocks and thus makes critical reflection about habits possible” (Rumelili 2015b, 19). The anxieties generated by fundamental transitions and the ensuing pressures to undergo TJ might thus open up space for breaking the habitual conflict patterns and the intersubjective negotiation and reformulation of identities (Rumelili 2015b), embracing and establishing a more “just memory” (Nguyen 2013) of the divisive past events in the present. A reflective approach to TJ accordingly tends to contribute toward a more systematic and comprehensive adoption of a range of TJ measures. Showcasing ability for introspection, adaptability, and aptitude to cope with change in reckoning with the legacies of the past self (Craib 1998, 72) indicates a heightened capacity for a self-reflexive, creative, and innovative engagement with the changing world (Giddens 1991, 40–41) and, consequently, lays the basis for a more cooperative stance in a state's foreign policy outlook. An alternative dynamic is still possible, reflecting an urge to sustain the known parameters of the self vis-à-vis the world. Quite alike to peace anxieties that may engender attempts to restore the antecedent “objects of fear, systems of meaning and standards of moral purpose” and thus a longing for a return to conflict/previous state of being (Rumelili 2015b, 13), the unsettling critical situation might not be capitalized upon as a moment of opportunity but dreaded and responded to with mnemonical security-seeking instead. The range of emotions (including anxiety, nostalgia, ambivalence, frustration, shame, and humiliation) generated by the juxtaposition of a state's past self with the liberal human rights–imbued standards of the global TJ norm may unleash a reaction of antecedent identity validation, rather than its critical revision by the state (cf. Lupovici 2016). A mnemonical security-orientation discourages state's critical introspection. The adoption of TJ accordingly tends to remain limited or highly selective (to the degree of its substantive dismissal). A mnemonical security-orientation in a state's approach to TJ might include the securitization of subjectivity (or an intensified search for a single stable identity; Kinnvall 2004, 749), radical othering of alternative mnemonical accounts, the militarization of memory by means of punitive memory laws, and by consequence, the prolongation or renewal of (mnemo)political conflict (cf. Browning 2016, 161). This raises moral issues and practical policy concerns for the international TJ norm promoters. The TJ and foreign policy nexus highlights not just the question of how communities cope with their self-inflicted scarring ruptures (Steele 2013b) in between various external pressures and internal demands. It also probes the ethos of international community's involvement in collective actors’ attempts to tackle their scars in one way or another, due to the implications of chosen TJ approaches for these actors’ foreign policy behavior along the conflictual-cooperative range. An ethically appealing TJ process avoids “bracketing” off certain ways of remembering the past by other communities (cf. Giddens 1991) for the sake of the actor's own sense of mnemonical, and by extension, ontological security. As Browning (2016, 161) puts it: “ontological security-seeking strategies are most ethically defensible when they prioritise an emphasis on self-reflexivity and openness to plurality. . . . potentially even embracing anxiety as a starting point for living a more authentic and morally fulfilling life.” A reflective approach to TJ not only confronts the scars of the past, probing alternative notions of responsibility and accountability in global politics (Steele 2011, 2013a, 2013b), but also entails acknowledgement that empathetic and cooperative foreign policy disposition post–fundamental transitions necessitates opening up to the “other in oneself”—learning to see the parallel presence of humanity and inhumanity in both one's own self and in one's historical enemy or victimized others. A just memory demands a shift toward an ethics of recognition of “how the inhuman inhabits the human” in both remembering one's own and remembering others (Nguyen 2016). In a “doubled ethical memory” powerfully advocated by Nguyen, “remembering is always aware of itself as being open-ended and in flux, rather than being satisfied with fixity and conclusiveness” (Nguyen 2013, 151). Such ethics of memory embraces the criticism of the achievability and ethical innocence of OS aspirations in the first place, acknowledging “the subject's opacity, contingency, non-innocence, and even expendability” instead (Rossdale 2015, 369). Mnemonical security-orientation in TJ policy is not only ethically problematic vis-à-vis the others but also counterproductive to the self's own sense of ontological wholeness, continuity, and safety (Mälksoo 2015a). This approach to TJ is furthermore prone to sustain conflicts in the international relations of the actor in question. Yet, the ethics of recalling others is an explicitly political choice (Nguyen 2013, 153) and comes at an emotional and political cost for various concerned parties. Balancing the reefs of OS-seeking in the process of dealing with one's violent and repressive past legacies should not amount to the former “perpetrator” state's usurping of the right to oversee the memory work of its historical “enemy” or “victimized” states. The international TJ community therefore needs to think hard how best to support cases of prolonged and inconclusive transitions of prominent, mnemonical security-oriented countries. To illustrate the empirical purchase of the analytical framework, and the related normative and practical political dilemmas for the TJ norm entrepreneurs, I now turn to the hard case of Russia's political handling of its Soviet past. The Hard Case of Post-Soviet Russia The repercussions of Russia's handling of its Soviet past in its historical memory-laden foreign policies at the bilateral, regional, and global levels highlight the central theoretical and methodological claims this article has made. Post-Soviet Russia probes the scope conditions of the allegedly general obligation of accountability for the past and the role of a state's perceived position in international society influencing its OS-seeking behavior after major transitions. Russia has been frequently dismissed in scholarly debates as an example of TJ failure since its official record in various dimensions of addressing the legacy of the Soviet regime has been either half-hearted or outright revisionist during the consolidation of the Putin regime (Andrieu 2011; Mälksoo 2015b). Methodologically, the exploration of Russia's idiosyncratic TJ policies, and their international implications, underscores the need to be attentive to the context in order to better distinguish between the instrumental compliance with an international expectation to “come to terms with” one's past and the internalization of the TJ norm by a society in question. Putting Russia in the empirical spotlight also makes it possible to bridge a gap in the literature on reckoning with the past in IR, wherein scholarly interest in the Russian case has not nearly reached the levels of scholarly interest in post–Second World War Germany and Japan. Meanwhile, the rich scholarship on Russian memory politics has yet to conceptualize the implications of Russia's political handling of its communist past for its international behavior. However, “memory is clearly crucial to understanding the case of Russia's international politics” (Neumann 2013, 24). A definitive account of the Russian case remains beyond the bounds of this article. My goal here is to provide in broad brushstrokes a summary illustration of the framework in the hope that it would serve as a focal point for further empirical studies. Resonating with Götz's (2017) call for more synthetic accounts of Russian foreign policy, the aim is not to refute the existing explanations of Russia's post-Soviet foreign policies (e.g., Hopf 2002; Legvold 2007; Larson and Shevchenko 2010; Neumann and Pouliot 2011; Tsygankov 2012, 2013) but to emphasize the currently overlooked importance of a state's TJ politics in informing its foreign policy behavior in particular ways. There are also important caveats in relation to applying the vocabulary of TJ in the Russian case. With its complex succession, various temporalities of both the Soviet regime7 and the consequent varieties of politically handling the Soviet past during late communism and the post-communist era,8 the Russian case pokes the very nature of transition in TJ: while the country has certainly undergone a change of power since the Soviet era, it remains an open question how substantive this change has really been.9 Most TJ mechanisms never really took hold as part of the Russian politics of transition. Except for the increasingly persecuted work of the Memorial Society,10 the piecemeal rehabilitation of the victims of the most serious political repressions and the guarded de-Stalinization campaign of the Medvedev administration, Russia's reckoning with its predecessor's repressive legacy has remained eclectic or downright revisionist during the Putin era (Khapaeva 2016). In Russia, TJ has been most tangible in regard to state-led policies involving the symbolic-representational acknowledgement of victims. Most conspicuously, Russia has essentially ignored the question of punishing perpetrators of the political repressions and gross human rights violations of its antecedent regime (Nuzov 2014). The occasional overlapping of the perpetrator-victim categories in Soviet history has further exacerbated the difficulty of “coming to terms with a suicide” for Russia (Etkind 2013; Viola 2013). In light of the considerable continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet elites in Russia (Sakwa 2011; Gill 2013; Nuzov 2014), the state's general aversion to assuming responsibility for past-related claims and toward the political and legal reassessment of the Soviet past is not unanticipated. The overall post-communist transition of Russia has purportedly produced a hybrid regime (Robertson 2011), which is selectively mimicking the normative language of the Western community, rather than fully abiding with democratic practices. Andrieu (2011, 200) has accordingly characterized the Russian case for its “faux” or pseudo-TJ interventions as an example wherein these measures have not aimed at democratization and the protection of victims’ rights as much as at legitimizing the new political elite. The presidential commission to “counter attempts at falsifying history against Russia's interests” (established in 2009, now disbanded) is a symptomatically Orwellian initiative of the kind (Brandenberger 2013). I posit that it is as vital to closely examine Russia's reasoning for not adopting certain TJ measures as the limited set the country has in fact pursued in its process of “coming to terms with” its Soviet past. Clunan (2009) has offered a comprehensive attempt to incorporate temporality, historical memory, and aspirations into the explanation of the emergence of state's national interests and status-seeking in international politics on the example of Russia. Her observation that “the past self can serve as the key identity standard, particularly in times of change, and the past becomes the benchmark against which the self attempts to verify its present identity” (Clunan 2009, 27) provides an important signpost for illuminating the causal dynamics in the TJ and foreign policy nexus in the Russian case. Russia's way of reckoning with its antecedent regime's legacy has had considerable repercussions for its relations with its former Soviet dependents and foreign policies in various multilateral settings, ranging from its politics of human rights and state accountability to pursuing particular discourses of historical justice in international fora, such as the UN, Council of Europe, and the OSCE. As the “state continuator” (gosudarstvo-prodolzhatel’) of the Soviet Union in international legal terms, the Russian Federation has been persistent in refusing to assume legal responsibility for the internationally wrongful acts of the Soviet regime, within and beyond its current borders. Russia's lack of political penitence toward the Eastern European nations and states affected by the Soviet repressive policies renders it an antipode of a “sorry state,” notably unwilling to publicly express contrition for past wrongdoings in order to promote reconciliation between the former repressor state and the repressed (Lind 2008). Meanwhile, the current Russian regime has appropriated the discourses of human rights, genocide prevention, and Holocaust remembrance for identity-political projects abroad.11 Most recently, Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its support for the separatists in eastern Ukraine have been shaped by mnemonical undercurrents in complex ways: Russian media has systematically demonized prodemocratic forces in Ukraine as “Nazis,” insinuating their intention to erase the historical memory of the Soviet victory in the war against Nazism and perpetrate genocide against Russian and Jewish minorities (Fedor 2015). A search for a continuous sense of self is crucial for understanding the linkages between Russia's way of handling its communist past and its engagement with the neighbors and world at large in the post-Soviet era. Russia's long-time reluctance to systematically reckon with its antecedent regime's repressive legacy (Adler 2012a; Khapaeva 2016) is consistent with its attempts to sustain the basic stability of a positive sense of its national self. The extent of adopted TJ measures, along with the close and thick reading of the accompanying political and public debates thus shed light on the issue of what kind of subject Russia wants to be. The crumbling and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition from communism presented Russia with a constitutive crisis about its continuous state identity, an attempted solution to which involved assuming the position of “the continuator state of the USSR.” The country's sense of confidence in its own continuity was significantly shaken, leading to a major disjuncture in state identity due to the interruption of previously taken-for-granted self-understandings and foreign policy role positions (cf. Guzzini 2012a, 3). As a radical disruption, the collapse of the USSR and the Soviet order forced the emerging Russian state and society to address fundamental questions of existence, finitude, relations, and autobiography (layer II in Figure 1; Ejdus 2017, 19). The situation of ontological dissonance ensued as the country struggled to transit to a “normal” liberal democratic and capitalist state, whilst self-conscious of its backwardness vis-à-vis Europe, nostalgic about, and eventually clinging to the image of a “great power” (associating “greatness” with the Soviet past).12 Combined with the considerable loss of territory (i.e., spatial pressures to revise the old self-concept),13 radical disruption of the ingrained normative horizon (collapse of the communist system), and newly unleashed status anxieties in international society, the country was faced with the accumulation of threats to its consistent sense of self, calling for a critical revision of its biographical narrative ((i) in Figure 1). Being suddenly forced into the role of a disciple rather than a revered and feared competitor, Russia suffered from an inferiority complex toward Europe during the post-communist transition due to the country's innate striving to be nothing but a “great power” (Neumann 2016, 1383). The trope of loss has consequently remained the most widely used symbolic device employed by Russians in their attempts to make sense of the Soviet experience in the post-Soviet context (Oushakine 2009), informing various public narratives of transition in the country ((ii) in Figure 1). In the tumultuous early 1990s, the Russian political elites followed the West without ever accepting Russia's secondary status: it was maintained that Russia had always been and remains a great world power (Reshetnikov 2011, 153). Russia's post-Soviet self remains unsettled, for no consensus has emerged about the Soviet past in the country (Etkind 2013, 246), and Russia's self-definition vis-à-vis Europe / the West is marred with ambiguities. Morozov (2015) shows how Russia's application of European-modeled measures to its subaltern realities has generally led to failure (e.g., in the post-Soviet economic collapse ordained by liberal Westernizers). While subsequent anxiety and exasperation strengthened vocal contestation of the West, present-day Russia still remains normatively utterly dependent on the Western hegemonic discourses, he maintains. The anxiety generated by the unsettled self was hardly helped by the fact that Russia, unlike several of its Central and East European counterparts, did not have much of a democratic tradition to return to after the collapse of the Soviet regime, and its post-Soviet transition therefore “came with no clear set of rules or paths to follow” (Oushakine 2009, 4). Compared to the de-Nazification policies adopted in Germany under international control after the end of the Second World War, Russia's de-Sovietization happened in very different circumstances after the unraveling of the Soviet empire. While post–World War II Germany was stigmatized by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union inter alia by being refused a veritable foreign and defense policy (Adler-Nissen 2014, 156–57), no systematic normative requirements to reckon with the violent legacy of Soviet communist regime and restrain its successor's international ambitions were presented by the Western community for Russia emerging from the shambles of the USSR. The Charter of Paris (1990) and the ECHR provided only a general normative framework, along with a degree of self-restraint applied in the early years of post-communist Russia through its disengagement from a global military role. In all, Russia's incentives to socially conform to the emerging norm to pursue TJ have been minimal, as no specific rewards or punishments have been insisted on by Russia's peers in the post–Cold War international community. The lack of external demands has further added to Russia's difficulty in incorporating abuses of the Soviet past into its post-Soviet self-narrative or facing up to the “other in oneself” for the dreaded undermining effect on the state identity that Russia has sought to reinforce (layers I and III in Figure 1). The costs entailed with reckoning with the violent legacies, traumas, and crimes of the past are not just emotionally charged but have tangible political consequences. The unqualified renouncing of the Soviet Union and the communist regime would have complicated the effortless inheriting of the “state continuator” (and more generally great power) status (including a seat among the UN Security Council's P5) for post-Soviet Russia.14 Russia's state-level “strategic silence” (Knutsen 2016) about certain problematic chapters in the life of its antecedent self is thus consistent with the basic premises of OS theory.15 Since Russia's institutionalization of the TJ norm is modest (A. in Figure 1),16 state TJ policies have been selective and controversial, mapping the dynamics of invoking the norm in the domestic political discourse becomes ever more significant. Investigating Russian understandings of the legitimacy of the TJ norm at the domestic level makes it possible, in turn, to shed light on the country's broader international outlook on issues as varied as human rights,17 individual accountability18 and state responsibility,19 and the pursuance of ideas of “historical justice” in various international formats—all of which point at the sphere of foreign policy as an important “issue area” for assessing the salience of the TJ norm for Russia (cf. Cortell and Davis 2000, 71). Such an analytic venture starts by asking detailed questions about how TJ has worked institutionally, socially, and politically in the country, instead of merely checking whether or not Russia fits with the various matrixes of TJ measures, and determining the ripple effects of individual TJ-related moves (cf. Kurki 2008, 271). It is about providing a thick, multilevel description of how reckoning with the communist-era human rights violations and international crimes has been actually understood in Russia; how this understanding has changed throughout the post-communist period (including perestroika years as a particularly volatile and discursively illuminating stage of immediate transition between the Soviet regime and the new Russian state, accompanied by Gorbachev's forthcoming and more cooperative “new thinking” in the Soviet foreign policy); and which reason attributions have framed various TJ-related moves. Coupling Russia's respective understandings with state- and society-led truth-and-justice-seeking initiatives along with its historical sensitivities toward the Western stigmatization and Orientalization of Russia recognizes the complex international-domestic dynamics at play in both the emergence of the country's truth-and-justice-seeking policies domestically and their international reverberations (layers I and III in Figure 1). The post-communist Russian debates over the (non)prosecution of the perpetrators of the Soviet violators of human rights (and the related definitional difficulties thereof) are of central interest, along with related commemoration, memorialization, and educational practices, various history commissions in Russia's bilateral relations with its former Soviet satellites, and the prevailing attitudes toward official apologies for the criminal legacy of the Soviet regime in Russia's public diplomacy. A close reading of Russia's post-Soviet discourses and practices of TJ contributes to a deeper understanding of Russia's preferences for a global normative order, the contemporary dynamics of its international identity and political outreach, and its current regime's perception of and attempted mobilization against certain normative threats (e.g., neo-Nazism). In Lebow's (2014) terms, Russia's idiosyncratic approach to TJ could be assumed to be a necessary but insufficient condition for explaining the country's post-Soviet foreign policy dynamics. By constraining and enabling Russia's foreign policy-making agents, the country's post-communist politics of truth-and-justice-seeking provides a specific contextual backdrop, meaning and conditions of possibility for particular empirical patterns in the country's foreign policy (cf. Weldes and Duvall 2001, 196). The foreign policy implications of Russia's political handling of its Soviet past can be delineated along bilateral, regional, and global dimensions (B. in Figure 1). The first range includes, for instance, Russia's guardedly regretful stance adopted toward the Katyn massacre in its relations with Poland in 2010, along with a number of bilateral “history commissions” established in recent years with Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania. Russia's state commission to counteract attempts of “falsification of history to the detriment of Russia's interests,” legislation on the appropriate and rightful frames of remembering the role of the USSR in World War II (Art. 354.1. of the Russian Penal Code), and handling of the relevant cases at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have a wider resonance in the Eastern European region. The global orbit of Russia's translation of its way of handling the Soviet past entails the country's fight against neo-Nazism in the UN and its forceful refutation of the East European policies that have sought the international condemnation of “communist crimes” in the OSCE and the Council of Europe among other international fora (Mälksoo 2014). The basic empirical upshot of this brief illustration is as follows: Russia's inability to settle the problem of its ontological consistency and continuity domestically (or its deeply ambivalent state-level settlement of its relationship toward the repressive legacy of the Soviet state) has contributed to a more aggressive form of OS-seeking behavior in the post-Soviet era internationally. The incongruity between the enormity of the repressions and crimes of the Soviet regime to reckon with and the limited politics of accountability actually pursued has been further amplified by the conflict between the emerging global normative expectations related to states’ politics of TJ, Russia's domestic normative order, and its sought standing in the contemporary international society. Grounding Russia's international behavior on the analysis of the political handling of its communist past dovetails with Allison's (2013, 18) argument on the Russian approach to military intervention, according to which “the Russian view of global norms and law . . . interacts in significant ways with conceptions of regional and domestic state order.” Arguably, great powers are particularly motivated to reproduce at the international level the values enshrined in their domestic political cultures (Morris 2005). This is why the Russian case matters for IR norm constructivists and TJ scholars. As Allison's important study of Russia's approach to military intervention and the norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) demonstrates, an examination of the emerging global standards of pertinent conduct (and their contestation thereof) needs to be juxtaposed with the way “major states’ commitment to global standards may be influenced by standards of conduct defined within and for a region” (Allison 2013, 18–19). States might wish to keep their own regional order in a different register as far as the particular norm's global expectations and restraints are concerned (Allison 2013, 19; cf. Kaczmarska 2015). Ontological insecurity arising from the half-hearted approach toward reckoning with the Soviet/communist legacy hence comes across as both a symptom and a trigger of Russia's growing assertiveness in international politics, from Ukraine (Nuzov 2017) and Syria to transatlantic relations. Russia's ominous record with human rights and the rule of law along with its kneejerk tendency to claim droit de regard of the mnemopolitical developments of the former Soviet republics20 illustrate the twofold precariousness of its current predicament in relation to the TJ-foreign policy nexus: Russia's protracted post-Soviet ontological insecurity about its continuity and status and its ensuing attempts to compensate for this unease on the international plane. This is the irony of OS-seeking geared toward the uncritical safeguarding of the past for the sake of sustaining a continuous self-concept: it tends to beat the purpose of enhancing a state's sense of “security in being” in practice (Mälksoo 2015a). The mnemonical security-orientation of Russia's TJ and foreign policies illuminates the ethical pitfalls of rigid securitization of one's self-concept,21 the radical othering of alternative mnemonical accounts,22 and unreflectiveness about the “other in oneself.” Conclusion This article has pointed at the lack of systematic attention on the connection between states’ (non-)adoption of particular TJ measures domestically and their international outlook. Bringing together largely disconnected literatures on TJ, OS, and norms in IR, I have offered a conceptual and methodological framework for studying the purported TJ and foreign policy nexus. The proposed analytical framework provides a fuller understanding and operationalization of state OS-seeking in international politics, rendered as a generic social mechanism, which makes it possible to systematically link states’ TJ and foreign policies. It sheds light on the interaction between states’ identity and international norms and the consequent policy effects of this interaction. Via this gap-bridging exercise, I have sought to provide a compelling groundwork for engaging in theory-building on the issue of how the failure to undertake major TJ measures translates into a more conflictual OS-seeking behavior at the international level. The analytical model, distinguishing between a reflective (A1.) and mnemonical security-oriented approach to TJ (A2.), and linking the twofold taxonomy to a state's proneness for cooperation or conflict (B1.1. and B2.2. in Figure 1), simultaneously makes it possible to draw further-reaching conclusions about the role of the state's perceived status in the implicit hierarchies of international society. This is presumed to contribute to a state's comprehensive or highly selective adoption of a particular TJ policy, in turn. I utilized the example of post-Soviet Russia in order to illuminate its struggle for biographical continuity and sustained status in international society. While the empirical sketch remains to be comprehensively substantiated along the suggested lines, the analytical model should also be subjected to further testing and consequent nuancing in various empirical contexts, such as Turkey, Israel and Japan. Conjoined by their late entrance to and/or stigmatization in international society, and a spotty, missing, or problematic record in dealing with past crimes and human rights violations, these cases vary along the assertive/conflictual and cooperative/peaceful scale. They could further test the role of ontological dissonance, status anxieties, and state's relational power in the interaction between the instrumental use and/or the internalization of the TJ norm, and state identity in international society. This article has made a threefold contribution. First, acknowledging the effects of TJ policies on international state behavior adds to the understanding of the sources and dynamics of state identity, foreign, and security policies. This is key for Russian foreign policy and historical memory scholarship, for “Russia's permanent and sometimes agonizing quest for identity” has been the “ultimately most poignant influence” on Russian foreign policy (Legvold 2007, 20). Secondly, by going beyond the dichotomy of states adopting or not adopting TJ mechanisms, the framework also contributes to TJ studies, as it highlights the distinct reception and international reverberations of significant non-Western states’ engagement with the allegedly global norm of TJ and points at the normative and practical policy implications for TJ advocates. Besides triangulating the proposed analytical framework with the existing analytical models on the sources of states’ international conduct, and horizontal testing of its applicability to other cases, further research could address how Russia's selective and instrumental appropriation of TJ mechanisms could potentially blur the original liberal substance of the TJ concept. As such, and finally, the proposed framework broadens the research agenda on international norms of IR constructivists by focusing on the complex interaction of the emerging TJ normative duty with a state's perception of its self. Acknowledgements I am sincerely grateful to the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of ISR for their genuinely helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article. Kirsten Ainley, Ingvild Bode, Tom Casier, Trine Flockhart, Karl Gustafsson, Stefano Guzzini, Catarina Kinnvall, Viatcheslav Morozov, Lauri Mälksoo, Iver Neumann, Bojan Savić, Lisa Strömbom, and Ilmar Üle provided friendly and insightful suggestions along the way. This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 691818 and a project seed grant from the University of Tartu, Estonia. The usual disclaimers apply. Footnotes 1 Whereas state “identity” and “continuity” are understood as identical in international law, IR theoretical schools assign concrete properties to state identities, such as rational ego-drivenness or various role characteristics. 2 Temporal othering of one's past self could still serve as a source of OS, as featured by the EU, for example (Wæver 1998). 3 I pursue a broadly constructivist understanding of power as relational, intersubjective, and social authority, for valued resources and measures of power are socially defined and contextually bound (Pouliot 2016, 78–81). 4 While liberal democratic transitions implicitly constitute the paradigmatic transition of TJ (Teitel 2000, 5; McAuliffe 2011), the very label has been applied to various empirical contexts, for example, those not involving liberal political transition, or any political transition at all, as well as to liberal Western democracies that have used certain measures from the TJ toolbox (Sharp 2015, 156). Defining what period qualifies as the transition for which TJ might be relevant is therefore highly case-specific: most definitions of TJ leave the supposed end point of transitions unspecified (Roht-Arriaza and Marieqcurrena 2006, 1). TJ can accordingly happen in various spells, stretched over a long period of time (Pettai and Pettai 2015, 22–31). 5 On Russia's search for a modern mnemonic narrative of the Soviet legacy through the lens of mimesis during the brief Medvedev interlude in the Kremlin, see Mälksoo (2015b). In the rhetorical adaptation parlance, this episode could also be read as an example of concurrent TJ norm-signaling in combination with the substantive norm disregard (see Dixon 2017, 85). 6 These include, along the dimensions of criminal-judicial, political-administrative, and symbolic-representational justice, court trials against former decision-makers, lustration policies (or banning of former officials and secret agents from occupying public positions in the new regime), public identification of former agents, enabling access to previous regime's secret files, rehabilitation and restitution policies vis-à-vis victims, and various symbolic measures (such as the establishment of truth commissions and state-sponsored memory collection, government-funded museums and other historical research institutions, victim organizations and reconciliation programs, rewriting history textbooks, various memorialization initiatives, official apologies, and condemnations) (Pettai and Pettai 2015, 25). 7 That is, Stalinist totalitarianism and the subsequent post-totalitarian system with more selective forms of repression compared to the earlier large-scale arbitrary terror. 8 Notably, late communism and even the early Yeltsin-era were marked by a more reflective approach to TJ in Russia, whereas particularly the Putin years have showcased an increasing search for mnemonical security. 9 As epitomized, in particular, by the continuity and relative power of the internal state security structures, or the KGB-FSB link in post-Soviet Russia. 10 For a recent notable grassroots initiative, see also the “last address” project (http://www.poslednyadres.ru, accessed October 20, 2017). 11 As exemplified by the Russian Foreign Ministry report on the situation with human rights in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (2013). 12 Powerful evidence of Soviet nostalgia at the collected level of social memory is provided in Svetlana Alexievich's oral history projects, particularly Secondhand Time (2017). Sociological polls have consistently demonstrated the popularity of Stalin as a leader of a strong state and the related status nostalgia in post-Soviet Russia. 13 It is in this context we should interpret Putin's famous words on the collapse of the Soviet Union being the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century (“Poslanie Prezidenta” 2005). Losing a considerable portion of the formerly inhabited space, along with millions of Russian compatriots to the newly independent states at Russia's borders has compelled the country to fundamentally reconsider its historical self-definition as an empire rather than a nation-state (layer III in Figure 1). 14 On Russia's “obsession” with status, see Malinova (2014); Heller, Forsberg, and Wolff (2014). 15 Similar reluctance towards integrating painful colonial and imperial legacies in contemporary self-narratives can be observed in case of many Western states as well. 16 For detailed accounts of Russia's choices in adopting particular TJ measures, see Bobrinsky et al. (2017); Calhoun (2004); Fein (2007); Stan (2009); Adler (2012 a, b); Andrieu (2011); Nuzov (2014). 17 The Russian Federation ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in 1998, but reacting to the flow of unfavorable rulings by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the State Duma adopted amendments to the Law on Constitutional Court in 2015, enabling Russia not to implement judgments of the European Court if deemed in conflict with the constitution. 18 As embodied in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Russia is not a state party of the Rome Statute of the ICC. 19 In Russia's case, this is mainly understood geopolitically, with reference to special international responsibilities of great powers (in comparison to the insignificance of small states), rather than via endorsing certain international norms. 20 For instance, by meddling in the “Bronze Soldier” crisis in Estonia in 2007 (Mälksoo 2009) or seeking to establish common declassification and secrecy policies for the Commonwealth of Independent States (Kramer 2012, 208–10). 21 As exemplified by Russia's “memory law” on World War II remembrance of 2014, criminalizing public dissemination of “knowingly false information” about the activities of the USSR during the Second World War, and stipulating concrete penalties in case of the law's violation. 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TI - The Transitional Justice and Foreign Policy Nexus: The Inefficient Causation of State Ontological Security-Seeking
JF - International Studies Review
DO - 10.1093/isr/viy006
DA - 2019-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-transitional-justice-and-foreign-policy-nexus-the-inefficient-EpE4urobF3
SP - 373
EP - 397
VL - 21
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -