Informers Up Close Stories from Communist Prague

Informers are generally reviled. After all, 'snitches get stitches.' Informers who report to repressive regimes are particularly disdained. While informers may themselves be victims enlisted by the state, their actions cause other individuals to suffer significant harm. Informers, then, are central to the proliferation of endemic human rights abuses. Yet, little is known about exactly why ordinary people end up informing on--at times betraying--other people to state authorities. Through a case-study of Communist Czechoslovakia (1945-1989) that draws from secret police archives, oral histories, and a broad gamut of secondary sources, this book unearths what fuels informers to speak to the secret police in repressive times and considers how transitional justice should approach informers once repression ends. This book unravels the complex drivers behind informing and the dynamics of societal reactions to informing. It explores the agency of both informers and secret police officers. By presenting informers up close, and the relationships between informers and secret police officers in high resolution, this book centres the role of emotions in informer motivations and underscores the value of dignity and reconciliation in transitional reconstruction. This book also leverages research from informing in repressive states to better understand informing in so-called liberal democratic states, which, after all, also rely on informers to maintain law and preserve order.

1 - Introduction
2 - History of Communist Czechoslovakia and Its Secret Police
3 - Reckoning with Informers and the Communist Past
4 - Informer File-Stories
5 - What Jumps Out: Informing as Intimacy and Emotions as Drivers
6 - Transitional Takeaways
7 - Informers Here, Informers There, Informers Everywhere

Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director of the Transnational Law Institute at Washington & Lee University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford, Université de Paris, VU Amsterdam, University of Melbourne, and Queen's University Belfast. Along with editing anthologies, he authored Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy (OUP) and Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law, both of which have been extensively reviewed and cited. His work has also been relied upon by courts. Drumbl has served as an expert witness in trial litigation, participated in treaty drafting, represented clients in genocide prosecutions and public inquiries, and consulted widely. Barbora Holá is Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has an interdisciplinary focus and studies international criminal justice, societal reconstruction after atrocities, and the aetiology of collective violence. Barbora has published extensively on these subjects and presented as an expert at international conferences and universities in Europe, Australia, Africa, and the Americas. Barbora co-edited The Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theories, Methods, and Evidence (OUP), and The Oxford Handbook on Atrocity Crimes (OUP).