The Ordinary, Liminal Lives of Informants in Participatory Dictatorships: Lessons for Transitional Justice

Haven’t you ever told on someone? Confessed, snitched, reported? Of course you have. We all have. The interactive act of gossiping, sharing secrets, providing information about the other, to friends and family, schoolteachers and deans, colleagues and bosses, the media, the police, or—to the state secret police under repressive regimes; there is something qualitatively mundane and everyday about the act of informing. Through stories from Communist Prague, Informers Up Close opens up the act of informing through an intimate and close reading of file-stories in the Czech archives. The file-stories of six informers figure actively in the book, yet the analysis of the phenomenon is animated by the review and analysis of about a hundred file stories in addition to cultural expressions, auto-biographies, and oral history projects about informing.

Generally, the book speaks to two areas of study of great interest and relevance to law and society scholars. First, as a case study of the everyday life of informing in Czechoslovakia under Communist rule (1948–1989), it sheds light on how social actors navigate the liminal space between state and society in repressive regimes. In doing so, the authors are guided by the “twin dialectic concepts” (6) of “participatory dictatorships” (Fulbrook 2005) and the “engineering of human souls” (Ratcliffe 2018)—Joseph Stalin’s terrifyingly beautiful description of writers. In a time of increasing autocratization and authoritarian populist movements (Nord et al. 2024), grounded attention to lives lived amidst the “ordinariness” of violence and to the hybridity of victims and victimizers in “participatory dictatorship” yield vital insights well beyond its case example. Second, informed by the analysis of case files of informers and their handlers, the authors demonstrate not only the frailty of transitional justice approaches to informers in the postcommunist Czech Republic but how transitional justice generally—as both a field of practice and of scholarship—is imbued with binary, reductionist, and putative logics well beyond its focus on criminal accountability.

In all, Informers Up Close provides insight into how law and society should speak to, with, and about informers. In addition, this is, simply, a beautifully written book. Academic jargon is replaced with attention to literary rhythm and flow, playful yet gracious and respectful of the stories retold and the people represented through them. Neither condescending nor apologetic of “their” informers, the intonation is one of human curiosity, spiralling inwards through a granular analysis of acts and actors so ordinary and mundane yet at the same time so central to the violence of repressive regimes.

Becoming Informed about Informers

Informers Up Close consists of seven chapters and a companion website. After setting the stage in the introduction, the second chapter draws readers into the specificity of the case study: the history of Communist Czechoslovakia and its secret police. Tasked with “ideological policing,” the secret police, known as the Státní bezpečnost (StB), had three functions: repression, prevention, and information. To do so, it relied on a pervasive net of informers, or “secret collaborators,” to mask the omnipresence of the StB amongst society, with the effects that it “stewed and brewed unease by turning citizen against citizen; loyalties frayed and individuals pettily looked out for themselves” (51). As is pointed out, only a minority of informers were recruited from the Communist party; instead, it is the commonplace of informing and informants that makes it such a fundamental constituent of “participatory dictatorship”—of be(in)g-forming everyday repression. The animating question of the book is thus: why? Why do people tell on others—their partners, parents, children; their neighbors, friends, and colleagues?

Chapter 3 deals with postcommunist transitional justice, and how much nuance was lost in the Czech transition to democracy. And it is here that “[t]he figure of the dangerous informer, however much a caricature, instrumentally emerged as one of the symbols of the former Communist regime, its criminality, and all its depravities” (67). After the fall of the Communist regime, a host of transitional justice laws and practices were implemented in Czechoslovakia, and, after its dissolution in 1993, the Czech Republic.¹ Among these were the opening of StB archives, but also architectural restructurings, criminal trials, lustration, memorialization, property restitution, and proclamations. While in the end, relatively few criminal trials have been carried out, the authors describe the transitional process as overwhelmingly retributive as opposed to reconciliatory, with a focus on condemnation, exclusion, punishment, and scapegoating. Lustration became the core mechanism of transitional justice, driven by an “urge to purge” (79)—and to transform the political order through moral cleansing and purification. Within this space, informants are hurled into ideological casts, as representatives of communism and the old regime, and antithesis to democracy, liberal capitalism, and modernity as such. Yet, as the authors note, “All of this belies the vexing question whether informers actually spoke to the StB because of their ideological allegiance to Communism or their overt approval of Communist practices, or whether they even cared about Communism or democracy” (81).

Partial File-stories, Partial Lives

In Chapter 4, readers get up close to the partial lives represented through the file stories of Vĕra, Vašek, Lily, Goldfus, Volný, and Soukup. Seventeen additional informer file-stories are presented on the book’s companion website. These twenty-four file-stories—selected from an initial review of approximately one hundred different informers—have been summarized, translated, and represented by the authors, and make up the main dataset for the granular reading of informing and informers through the StB files. The informers presented are a varied group of people—diverse in terms of age, social status, occupations, length of informing, how they were recruited, and how their StB relationship was terminated (most because of “meagre results,” others because of imprisonment, death, old age, emigration, etc.). Most had travelled internationally, some acting as double informers for Czechoslovakia and other countries.

In the subsequent chapter, the book provides an analysis of “what jumps out” from these file-stories, revealing both “the engineering effects of authoritarianism on the human soul and the participatory nature of the individual amid dictatorships” (151). Several propositions are made based on interpretations of the file-stories. First, that informing shapes up as a relational and intimate act of social navigation. Second, that (e)motions catalyze and fuel the kinetics of the process; in particular, the (e)motions of fear, resentment, desire, and devotion. Third, displays of interactive agency among informers and their StB handlers can be detected from the “ebb and flow” of the relationship, highlighting the longitudinal aspect of informing. Fourth, the case files also reveal concern and worry from the StB officers regarding “their” informers. And, finally, that the file-stories reveal variability when it comes to individual positioning and situational power: “we note the liminality and at times the woefulness of informers. Some informers may be victims who in turn may victimize; some are dispositionally meek and weak but wreak havoc in the lives of others; other informers do not present as vulnerable or marginal; some informers may not really victimize anyone, as they appear adept at engaging the StB and, while garrulous, manage to dissemble and stall so as to promote their own interest while minimally imperiling others” (154). In sum, this chapter offers the analysis of informers “up close,” revealing the dynamic relationship between informants and their handlers and the intimacy—closeness, familiarity—arising from it. As the authors note: “Much of the information contained in many of the files we have analyzed is parlayed in a way that reads somewhat like a conversation between two friends (or frenemies) over a beer or coffee where one friend (or frenemy) complains and gossips about families, acquaintances, comrades, and foes while the other listens and—in what does depart from an ordinary conversation—then records” (157). It is the ordinariness and the quotidian practice of gossiping, wanting to be heard, to matter, to count for something, that emerges from their readings. The case files tell stories of where the private and public blur, and where family disputes, neighborhood gossip, and secrets about drunkenness and adultery abound—information that may be weaponized by the politics of the state, but also, at times, leads StB handlers to act as life coaches and express sentiments of concern and care. Yet, despite all the banality, mundanity, and even intimacy embedding this violent whispering; “[i]nforming quite simply broke a number of informants, shattering their souls and spirits” (229).

The authors are clear about the book being a “story about stories” (191), and that “file-stories are but partial life stories” (12). While they discuss the epistemic value of the case files and draw on phenomenology to “infer which emotions animated informers based on how StB officers represented them in the reports and on how others described them to the StB” (19) (informers were usually informed upon), there is, of course, epistemological limitations to identifying people’s emotions based on the data at hand. The file stories are, above all, representations of informants made through the logic of StB officers (in addition to being translated and represented into narrative summaries by the authors). Inferring which emotions drive informers to inform may thus be a bit of a methodological stretch given the multiple layers of representation, translations, incompleteness, and, not least, the violent potential underlying the production of these masses of information. With that said, to me, the typology of (e)motions appear less crucial than the complex ordinariness arising out from the book’s story for understanding informers and the social practice of informing. I can see myself in Vĕra, Vašek, Lily, Goldfus, Volný, and Soukup. I can see the people I surround myself with. People I trust—or think I do. It is the insight from the partial lives of these partial file-stories to produce this embodied awareness of collective, interactive, participatory violence in repressive societies—that informants were not deviant others—that carries the potential for key transitional takeaways presented in the book’s penultimate chapter.

The Cruelty of Transitional Justice

In Chapter 6, the authors argue for an aetiological expressivist function of transitional justice, that is, to tell it how it was. They depart from the failure of transitional justice in the Czech Republic to do so, showing how the country instead implemented measures that relied on “excessive simplifications” that not only rejected the multifaceted nature of informing and informants but also constructed them as “dangerous devotees to the old regime” (197). This reductionism may have created comfort for some, yet, in flatly erasing the humanity of informers (207), transitional justice in the Czech Republic also led to cruelty for some—for the informants themselves that were exposed but also the informed upon, whose “secrets” were also exposed in the name of transparency. In doing so, the authors question the “self-evident affection transitional justice has for transparency and its concomitant revulsion at secrets” (214). To me, this argument remains one of the most astute. The retributive and punitive elements of transitional justice have become a well-known critique (Drumbl 2007; McEvoy 2017). However, the critique of the reductionism embedded in these logics has always—to my knowledge—been linked to the dominance of legal accountability and the reductionist thinking embedded in individual criminal accountability. Yet, this book vividly demonstrates how punitiveness may also “creep into accountability modalities such as truth commissions, reparations, lustration, transparency measures, and civil sanctions” (198). Indeed, the binary and reductionist logic of delineating and demarcating victims and perpetrators, guilt and innocence in transitional processes of purifying the collective conscience may be just as prevalent in the messianic imperative of “the right to truth” as in the “call for justice.” This is relevant to the entire field of transitional justice, in a (re)consideration of what kind of “truth” is really sought in the aftermath of mass violence and repressive regimes. Secrecy, as the authors remind us, is indispensable for resistance too.

In the final chapter, the book zooms out to question what this all means for the phenomenon of informing “beyond the shadow of autocracy” (230) and on to so-called liberal societies. Discussing acts of informing on COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, abortion law violations, whistleblowing, and the ordinary criminal informant, questions revolve around how “just” and “unjust” informing is contextual, contingent, and determined retrospectively. In all, there are important parallels here to criminological research on how also “ordinary” justice institutions in established democracies are fraught with labelling, stigmatizing, and “othering” certain individuals. For scholars of law and society, a question remains, however, to what extent the Durkheimean social functions of such othering are particularly acute in transitional states to delineate and demarcate the moral boundaries of the becoming (liberal, capitalist) political order? In any event, by unearthing the humanity of informants as “victims who victimize” (189), the book succeeds in sketching out a path forward to curb the urge to purge in transitional contexts. Because, as the authors remind us:

[T]oday’s just causes can become tomorrow’s failed orthodoxies and the generation’s historical ignominies. So the cycle goes, over and again, again and over. Such is the wheel of history. Throughout, it seems, informers abound. The informer is as timeless as change: always here, always there, everywhere, never nowhere (243).