BB: Reimagining Expertise in EU Judicial Reform: Epistemic Injustice & the Case of Albania

This paper uses Albania’s 2016 judicial reform as a case study to examine the epistemic hierarchies embedded in European Union enlargement processes. Although widely praised as a technical and political success, the reform reveals patterns of privileging external knowledge over local knowledge from an epistemic perspective. The analysis focuses on whose knowledge counts in shaping constitutional reforms and how credibility ascriptions are structured by broader power asymmetries between the EU and accession countries. Drawing on theories of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007; Dotson 2012; Pohlhaus 2017), decolonial epistemology (Alcoff 2022; Mitova 2025), critical theories of Europeanization (Manners 2002), and insights from an ongoing qualitative case study, the paper argues that EU-driven reforms reproduce forms of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice: Albanian judges, legal scholars, and public administrators are treated as less credible knowers than foreign experts, and Albania’s institutional context is frequently rendered unintelligible within dominant European vocabularies of constitutionalism. These dynamics foster both structural dependency and internalized epistemic marginalization, as local actors come to distrust their own epistemic authority. 

The paper contributes to current debates on comparative constitutionalism by foregrounding the epistemic dimension of transitional reform. It enriches this discussion by (1) demonstrating how transitional justice processes require attention to epistemic (in)justice, and by (2) advancing a diversified notion of expertise that includes the situated knowledge of local actors, expanding contemporary calls to diversify expertise beyond the familiar examples in scientific contexts to the domain of legal and constitutional reform. As a corrective, the paper calls for forms of epistemic reparation that recognize community-specific expertise and rebalance EU-Albania relations. More broadly, the Albanian case underscores the limits of the EU’s self-understanding as a “normative power” and highlights the need for more context-sensitive, epistemically inclusive approaches to constitutional transformation. 

Arnisa Tepelija is a doctoral candidate in comparative constitutional law at the Department of Law, Central European University (CEU) Vienna. Her dissertation focuses on the conceptualization of the notion of judicial independence in the European constitutional sphere and its transfer process through judicial reforms in pre-accession countries, focusing especially on the case of Albania. Since 2025, she has been engaged as a lecturer of European Law at this University. She is the author and co-author of several scientific articles published by Routledge, Cambridge University Press and Hart Publishing on judicial independence, judicial reform, transitional justice, and more generally on the rule of law. She is a Member of the Editorial Board of the German Law Journal, and a member of the Academic Network of the Council of Europe (OCEAN) for Austria. Her research is informed by extensive professional experience in the fields of rule of law and EU integration. Her previous experience includes amongst others working as an Advisor to the Minister of Justice of Albania, and as a High-Level Expert to the Parliamentary Special Committee (PSC) “On Deepening Reforms for Good Governance, Rule of Law, and Anti-Corruption for Albania 2030 in the European Union”.