The question of social trust in the legitimacy of law-producing and lawimplementing institutions is closely related with individuals' experiences especially in countries with state-sponsored regimes of repression and violence. In Bulgaria and Greece, memories of past repressions, contributed to endemic distrust in public authority and its legal institutions until today. The current research project focuses on the present schisms and heritage from experiences of radical changes, political instabilities and discontinuities. It intends to enlarge the problematic of the hidden order and social distrust by studying the instrumentalised dichotomy between ‘people from the Left' and ‘people from the Right' in the light of the labelling process of individuals and groups as belonging to ‘ours' or ‘others'.

The concrete questions to be explored focus on:

• How do social actors describe the political other in the context of their everyday interactions?
• How does genealogy link to political belongings and to the process of construction, maintenance, invention or re-invention of a coherent account of one's ‘pure' Rightist/Leftist identity?
• How does the mechanism of exclusion and/or inclusion work in the interactions between individuals and when do socially-attached etiquettes assume a stigmatising or, inversely, prestigious social role?
• How do Right or Left belongings shape an intimate ‘internal order', especially with regard to the micro-universe of family relationships?
• What is at stake in Left/Right competing historiographies?
• Within this almost ethnic fracture, how do individuals experience the extreme politicisation of legal, social and political institutions and find ways to transcend their ‘embeddedness'?

The project hopes to shed light on sentiments of distrust and lack of confidence on law and legal institutions by extracting from social relations those fundamental divisions that lead to the extreme politicisation of social life and create endemic affiliations to the rightist or leftist space in society.