Academic Year 2012-13

Post-Communist Metamorphoses of the "nomenklatura neighbourhood" Privatization and Political Elites in Romania

event

Speaker	Dr Damiana Otoiu Lecturer, Political Science Department, University of Bucharest; LSEE Visiting Fellow
Chair	Dr Will Bartlett Senior Research Fellow in the Political Economy of SEE, LSE
Date	Tuesday, 12 March 2013

On Tuesday 12 March, Dr Damiana Otoiu gave a talk entitled Post-Communist Metamorphoses or the "nomenklatura neighbourhood", privatization and political elites in Romania, in which she the transformation of the "Primăverii" (Spring) district in the North of Bucharest into an area exclusively intended for the nomenklatura, whether it was the Romanian political "elite", intellectuals close to the Communist Party, high officers of the Red Army, or of the political police.

Dr Otoiu's presentation outlined the fact that after the fall of the communist regime "Primăverii" continued to be the district of the political and economic elite par excellence. The non-restitution of nationalised property was, at least during the first
post-communist decade, the main strategy whereby the "new" elite managed to keep control over the former property of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Dr Otoiu is a LSEE Visiting Fellow. With a PhD in Political Science from the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Damiana is an anthropologist of politics whose research is focused on (re)defining and disputing property rights in postsocialist and postcolonial contexts. She is also a lecturer in Political and Urban Anthropology in the Department of Political Science of the University of Bucharest, and a Research Associate of the Center for the Study of Political Life (CEVIPOL), Université Libre de Bruxelles.