Mehrnoush Najafiragheb (Université de Poitiers) has posted Vetting and Communicative Action in Post-Authoritarian Transition: Lessons from Iraq’s De-Baathification on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Vetting can help a new political order remove officials linked to repression, but it can also become a new form of exclusion. Existing standards rightly stress legality, individual assessment, due process and independent review, and also address programme design. This article examines a more specific question: how the purposes and categories of vetting should be justified, challenged and revised as new knowledge and experience emerge. Drawing on Habermas’s theory of communicative action, discourse ethics and his later work on law and democracy, it argues that top-down reform has both a political and a cognitive weakness. A small group may control the process while also acting on incomplete knowledge. Iraq’s de-Baathification is used to develop the argument. The case shows why purpose must be connected to categories, why rules must remain open to review and why participation can improve both legitimacy and the information on which reform is based.
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