Professor Colleen Murphy has a new co-authored piece out in Public Seminar on the use of the transitional justice tool of lustration to root out members of the military or police with ties to white nationalist or far right extremist groups. An excerpt follows:
"The storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on January 6 has made it clear that a surprising number of police and military veterans are currently affiliated with armed right wing militias.
"But suspending and firing a few police officers and soldiers in response likely won’t suffice. And any mass purge of America’s armed forces might even make the problem worse. After all, the Ku Klux Klan was formed by Confederate soldiers who were fired after our Civil War.
"So what is to be done?
"One promising alternative used in recent decades by former authoritarian countries as part of their efforts to consolidate their new democratic regimes has been “lustration” (from the Latin – in English “to lustrate” means to purify ceremonially.)"
Read the full piece at publicseminar.org.