Symposium on Informers Up Close: Weaponizing the Populace

[Saira Mohamed is Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley]

Mark Drumbl and Barbora Holá’s fascinating Informers Up Close: Stories from Communist Prague offers a rigorous and engrossing account of the lives of informers in Czechoslovakia and the reckoning that comes for them after the fall of Communism. The book gives the reader so much to grapple with and grab hold of. The authors’ presentation of six “file stories”—the narrative accounts drawn from the files of the Státní bezpečnost (StB), the Czech name of the secret police—along with the additional accounts in the rest of the book and in the online appendix—give rich texture to the lives of the book’s subjects, presenting the informers as real, complicated people living in real, complicated times, rather than leaving the reader to imagine a fuzzy outline of the figures and the world they inhabit. The file stories, moreover, make clear that the motivations and experiences of the informers are varied and complex, jumbled and messy. These are—like all real people—multidimensional actors who change over time and who behave differently in different contexts. The accounts also give the reader an appreciation for the intimacy, and at times camaraderie, of the informer-handler relationship and a comprehension of the idea of informing as a social practice. Beyond that, Informers Up Close is an astute critique of the transitional justice process in post-Communist Czechoslovakia and the new Czech Republic. The juxtaposition of the file stories with the transitional accounts of informers makes clear that in the transitional processes, the informers are flattened, caricatured, transformed from full, real people into cartoonish ideologues. And it explains why this flattening takes place—the ease of scapegoating, the comfort of a common enemy, the perceived need to unite a fragile new society. 

To me, one of the most interesting features of the book is its illumination of the ways that a state can abuse its people—including by turning them into tools of repression. As Drumbl and Holá write, “Informers were weaponized by the state.” In the vision of the post-Communist state, the informers are to be blamed for having served as weapons of the Communist surveillance state, for their role in the repression that now must be condemned and stigmatized and stamped out. (Yet another contribution: the book’s elucidation of how a transitional justice process can be retributive in its goals and impact, even without criminal trials.) But as Informers Up Close emphasizes, these are “circumscribed actors,” both victim and victimized. To be turned into a weapon of repression is itself an act of betrayal by the state. I mean not only that the StB took people’s vulnerabilities—their criminal histories or complicated families—and used those against them. I mean also that they used these people as instruments of repression. Through the perspective of human rights law, we might more readily focus on those abuses that we can name through the categories set forth in treaties and by custom—violations of the right to free expression, or the right to free assembly, or the right to freedom of movement. Or we might think of the lack of due process accorded to those named in the Cibulka lists, the publication of which, the book notes, was ironically described by Václav Havel as a victory for the StB, in light of its similarity to the repressive practices of the StB itself. Human rights law, however, also should remind us of the broad vision of the state’s role as caretaker or protector, of a state’s responsibility toward the individuals under its authority or control. The book offers a potent example of how, in weaponizing the individuals who work for the state as informers, other state actors—especially those who plan and organize the broader programs of informing and repression—are breaching their own commitments toward the people they are supposed to protect. 

Informers Up Close also helps us to understand why we might be slow to recognize the informers as victims of state abuse. As the book explains, they are victimizers themselves, and individuals occupying such liminal spaces do not fare well in the “moralizing and condemnatory frames of transitional justice.” I want to offer two additional points in relation to the dual identity of informers as victimizers and victimized, both of which I am exploring in my own work on government obligations toward their own military personnel. First, we often lump together those who work for the state with the state itself. Just as we see soldiers as the state, and have a hard time recognizing when soldiers are being abused by their leaders, we see informers as the state, rather than seeing them as subject to victimization by the state. Accordingly, we fail to recognize abuses of state actors by state actors. The singular view of informers as villains in the view of the post-Communist states exemplifies this; reckoning with the old regime meant treating those who operated within it as wrongdoers. Second, we are slow to recognize abuses that are perpetrated in contexts in which the individuals subject to abuse are seen to have had a choice. (The book also nicely illustrates how challenging it was for informers to say no when “asked,” even while they also were following their own ambitions and desires at the same time.) The idea that the informers were seeking money or adventure, for example, makes it easier to see them as pure villains; to the extent they are mistreated by their superiors, they are simply enduring what they signed up for. So, too, with soldiers in the American all-volunteer military, or the former prisoners who have secured a way out of prison by agreeing to deploy to the front lines in Russia’s war against Ukraine without proper training or equipment. The fact that someone has chosen a life, however, does not vitiate the state’s responsibilities to treat that person as an individual with dignity. What that means, of course, will vary according to the particular context. But the point remains the same; the presence of some perceived choice muddles our ability—both in the law and outside of it—to see exploitation when it happens.

The book illuminates another way that a state can abuse its own people: by turning them against one another. Describing the “fishbowl” in which people lived in Communist Czechoslovakia, the authors explain that “[t]he politics of the state festered these spaces of distrust to corrode personal bonds so as to fritter away the private and in turn centralize the state. Lying, dissembling, and pretending became omnipresent.” I love this passage for its deployment of the transitive “festered,” a verb we more often see in its intransitive meaning to describe something deteriorating on its own. The word choice is so clever because of course the distrust did not merely fester on its own, and the borderlands protecting the private did not merely disappear through natural erosion. The government actively worked to systematically destroy personal connections in order to ensure the totalizing power of the state. What better way to ensure that the state cannot be toppled than to convince the entire populace that they can trust no one. 

During the days I was devouring the book and since that time, I have found myself thinking a lot about Texas. While I was immersed in Communist-era Czechoslovakia, in the lives and rhythms of the informers and their handlers, in the politics of the transition and the new democratic state, my mind continually returned to thoughts of Texas in 2021, and to SB8, the state’s law that banned abortion even before the United States Supreme Court opened the door for all states to do so, and to the provision of that law enabling private citizens to sue any person who facilitated an abortion and to collect a minimum of $10,000 in reward. Reports at the time described the measure primarily as a way to restrict abortion and evade possible limits that might come through regulation under the criminal law or through the pending decision in Dobbs. SB8, however, did far more than that. It also was a way for the state to use its own people, to weaponize its citizens, to turn them against one another, a connection Drumbl and Holá note that they themselves raised when they spoke with interlocutors about circumstances that would constitute just or unjust informing. Texas turned its people into informers. And by doing so, it enhanced the power of the state not only by restricting individuals’ access to reproductive health care, but also by disrupting and destabilizing individuals’ relationships with their colleagues and neighbors and families and friends.

I thought about Texas while I was reading not only because of the factual parallels. I thought about it also because what Drumbl and Holá offer in this book is both a deep dive and a sweeping panorama as they note in their introduction to this symposium. This book is a richly researched catalog of informing in Czechoslovakia, and it is an analysis of informing more broadly. It is a critical examination of the treatment of informers after the fall of Communism and a critique of the moral goals and the moral failures of transitional justice processes. It is a study of individual lives alongside a history of Communist Czechoslovakia. It is a descriptive and normative and theoretical contribution to the field of perpetrator studies. It is a deliberation of subjectivity during objectification. The reason my mind wandered to Texas was that the book encourages and enables the reader to think both in specifics and detailed context and in broader themes and syntheses. I look forward to continuing to reflect on the book’s many contributions.