States of Contention: State-Led Political Violence in Post-Socialist Romania

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s, Romania's transition from authoritarianism was witness to repeated instances of intense collective violence. Specifically, miners from the country's Jiu Valley region descended on Bucharest—attacking civilians, offices of the free press, and the headquarters of opposition parties. This article attends to the strikes of June 1990 and, in so doing, addresses the broader issue of political violence during the early phases of a political transition. As one of the few cases of (nonethnic) transitional violence in Central and Eastern Europe, the miners' strikes have been put forward as evidence of an oft-cited Romanian “exceptionalism.” However, this article's focus on the perceived extrainstitutional threat to the weakly legitimate National Salvation Front government, and the violent response to that threat by the government (which coordinated the miners' attacks), leads to a conclusion in which Romania's posttransition violence is seen as a rational—albeit devastating—manifestation of regular politics, by “other means.”