Capital Punishment and the Late Socialist State

This book project tackles one of the knottiest dilemmas of modern state power: why do states continue to kill legally their citizens even if the trouble it causes largely outdoes the benefits? While my research centres on unfortunate fates of individual human beings, the questions they raise are of broader socio-political importance: Why do states kill? What does state-sponsored killing tell us about the nature of state power? And about the collective identity that holds these polities together? From the very outset of modern reflection on penalty, starting with Beccaria, various thinkers paid attention to capital punishment as the backbone of state power. It was a symbol of a sovereign ruler – be it of an absolutist monarch or general popular will. Yet the increasing shift towards ‘civilisation’ placed this expression of sovereignty under pressure, and states across the globe coped with this challenge in manifold ways. My book explores this process in the specific context of state socialism, particularly in its post-Stalinist phase. My key question is simple, but, I hope, powerful and stimulating: why does the socialist state continue to kill after Stalinism? With this perspective I aim to open novel vistas on socialist statehood und modern state power in general.

In contrast to most narratives of post-1945 Europe, I seek a convergence perspective on East and West. I ask how the legitimacy meaning of the death penalty changed after the excessive killing of Stalinism had ended and the death penalty was largely transferred to the non-political sphere of justice. In Stalinism, state killing was justified on the grounds that revolutionary violence was a part of the struggle against the class enemy. After 1956 this started to change when communist states refrained from excessive use of the death penalty and violence more generally, offering citizens a ‘normal life’ instead. The distancing from the Stalinist terror, however, created a new legitimacy problem, since it became increasingly difficult to justify any usage of physical force in general. The possibility of a critique of state violence proved a weak spot of state power, while the emergence of the Western welfare state as the predominant model intensified this legitimacy tension. I argue that the de-politicisation of state violence was crucial for undermining of the sovereign power of the communist state.