Deferred Transitional Justice and Europeanisation: Rethinking Post-Communist Accountability in Albania

Albania's post-communist transition (1991–present) is often characterized as a case of incomplete or failed Transitional Justice (TJ). This article challenges that framing by reconceptualizing Albania's experience as one of deferred TJ , a condition in which unresolved accountability demands from the initial transition period are not extinguished but rather displaced onto subsequent institutional and normative processes, particularly those driven by Europeanisation. Through archival and legislative analysis, the article examines the selective enforcement of lustration, stalled property restitution, and the delayed opening of Sigurimi intelligence files decades later. Rather than linear failures, these represent a ‘layered accumulation’ of justice claims reactivated by EU conditionality and memory politics. The article proposes a tripartite analytical framework, temporal displacement, normative reconfiguration, and participatory deficit , to analyze how deferred justice operates in peripheral European states. The framework contributes to critical TJ scholarship by de-centering the dominant post-conflict paradigm and foregrounding the distinctive temporalities of post-authoritarian accountability in South-Eastern Europe.