Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans covers civil society engagements with transitional justice processes in the Balkans. The Balkans are a region marked by the post-communist and post-conflict transitional turmoil through which its countries are going through. This volume is intended to provide a comprehensive introduction to research in transitional justice in this part of the world, mostly written by local scholars. Transitional justice is ever-growing field which responds to dilemmas over how successor regimes should deal with past human rights abuses of their authoritarian predecessors. The editors and author emphasize the relatively unexplored and under-researched role of civil society groups and social movements, such as local women’s groups, the role of art and community media and other grass-roots transitional justice mechanisms and initiatives. Through specific case-studies, the unique contribution of this volume is not only that it covers a part of the world that is not adequately represented in transitional justice field, but also that the volume is the first project originally researched and written by experts and scholars from the region or in collaboration with international scholars.

This book explores the ambiguous role played by civil society in the processes of state-building, democratization and post-conflict reconstruction in the Western Balkans challenging the assumption that civil society is always a force for good by analysing civil society actors and their effects in post-communist and post-conflict transition.

The condemnation of wartime sexual violence as a gross violation of human rights has received widespread support. While rape and other forms of sexual violence have attracted considerable local and international attention, this often excludes wartime sexual violence among women belonging to so-called ‘perpetrator’ war-torn nations. This book explores the silence surrounding women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence within academic, legal and public discourses. Olivera Simić argues that the international criminal law and feminist legal discourse on wartime sexual violence can construct a problematic victim hierarchy that excludes and misrecognises certain women’s experiences of sexual violence during and after armed conflict. The book focuses on the experiences of Bosnian Serb women, where the collapse of the former Yugoslavia led to brutal war and gross human rights violations throughout the 1990s. Two decades after the war, women in Bosnia and Herzegovina are still facing the legacies of the violence in the 1990s. Through this case Simić argues that while all women survivors of rape face problems of stigma, shame and lack of political visibility, their legal and symbolic status differ according to their ethno-national identity. Drawing on interviews with Bosnian Serb women survivors of rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, feminist activists, local media, documentary and archival sources, the book examines ‘post-conflict justice’ as it is seen, lived and interpreted by women who belong to ‘perpetrator’ nations and will be of great interest and use to researchers, students and practitioners within post-conflict law and justice, international criminal law, security studies and gender studies.

Using the way in which artists from the former Eastern bloc perceive the experience of EU integration and transition from a Soviet past as a conceptual launching pad, this book explores how artists critically inhabit a permanent state of 'in-between' to capture the simultaneous existence of multiple and overlapping temporalities. Transitional aesthetics are artistic strategies that disrupt and interrogate ideologically loaded trajectories of cultural, social, or political transition. Examples of such trajectories include the movement from totalitarianism to democracy (post-socialism), from war to freedom and reconciliation (post-conflict), and from the edges of Europe to its centre (inclusion in the European Union). These transitional states include: the future orientation of (failed) socialism and the perpetual present of global capital; the history of unresolved past conflicts and reconciliation through 'transitional justice'; nationalist obsessions with the past and the cultural appeal of kitsch and retro objects in fashion, film and music; and the uncertain future promise of EU membership and resurgence of global right-wing populism, headed by figures like Berlusconi, Le Pen, and Trump. Transitional Aesthetics shows that apprehending time in contemporary art is fundamental to capturing the lived experience of a permanent state of instability; particularly relevant to Europe in the contemporary moment. In a world that has entered 'accelerated transition' towards instability, understanding this experience has broad and resonating relevance for politics, art and society.

This book explores pathways to redress for main groups of victims/survivors of the 1992-5 Bosnian war —families of missing persons, victims of torture, survivors of sexual violence, and victims suffering physical disabilities and harm. The author traces the history of redress-making for each of these groups and shows how differently they have been treated by Bosnian authorities at the state and subnational level. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, thousands of war victims have had to suffer re-traumatising ordeals in order to secure partial redress for their suffering during 1992–1995 and after. While some, such as victims of sexual violence, have been legally recognised and offered financial and service-based compensation, others, such as victims of torture, have been recognized only recently with a clear geographical limitation. The main aim of the book is to explore the politics behind recognizing victimhood and awarding redress in a country that has been divided by instrumentalized identity cleavages, widespread patronage and debilitating war legacies. It shows how war victims/survivors navigate such fragmented and challenging public landscape in order to secure their rights.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the trial of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). With the premature death of Milošević in March 2006 his trial was left unfinished. Although the traditional objectives of criminal law, such as retribution, justice for victims, and deterrence, were not achieved, the Milošević trial archive is a significant historical resource for researchers from various fields. This book extracts details from the collection of documentary and transcript evidence that makes up the trial record – sources which would be almost impossible to extricate without an insider’s guiding hand – to allow readers to trace the threads of several historical narratives. The value of this methodology is particularly evident in the Milošević case as, acting as his own defence counsel, he responded to, and interacted with, almost all witnesses and evidence presented against him. By providing snapshots of the behaviour displayed by Milošević in court while conducting his defence, in combination with passages of carefully selected evidence from an immense archive familiar to few scholars, this volume reveals how these trial records, and trail records in general, are a truly invaluable historical source. The book underlines the premise that any record of a mass atrocities trial, whether finished or unfinished, establishes a record of past events, contributes to interpretations of a historical period and influences the shaping of collective memory. This book will be of much interest to students of the Former Yugoslavia, war crimes, international law, human rights, international relations and European politics.

Providing detailed and comprehensive coverage of the transitional justice field, this Research Handbook brings together leading scholars and practitioners to explore how societies deal with mass atrocities after periods of dictatorship or conflict. Situating the development of transitional justice in its historical context, social and political context, it analyses the legal instruments that have emerged.

This volume examines the EU’s Global Strategy in relation to human security approaches to conflict. Contemporary conflicts are best understood as a social condition in which armed groups mobilise sectarian and fundamentalist sentiments and construct a predatory economy through which they enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary citizens. This volume provides a timely contribution to debates over the role of the EU on the global stage and its contribution to peace and security, at a time when these discussions are reinvigorated by the adoption of the EU Global Strategy. It discusses the significance of the Strategic Review and the Global Strategy for the re-articulation of EU conflict prevention, crisis management, peacebuilding, and development policies in the next few years. It also addresses the key issues facing EU security in the 21st century, including the conflicts in Ukraine, Libya and Syria, border security, cyber-security and the role of the private security sector. The book concludes by proposing that the EU adopts a second-generation human security approach to conflicts, as an alternative to geopolitics or the ‘War on Terror’, taking forward the principles of human security and adapting them to 21st-century realities. This book will be of interest to students of human security, European foreign and security policy, peace and conflict studies, global governance and IR in general.

Global Civil Society 2011 combines activist and academic accounts of contemporary struggles to promote, negotiate and deliver justice in a global frame without a central authority. In their engagement with cultural diversity and their networked communication the contributors rethink and remake justice beyond the confines of the nation state.

Providing a novel multi-disciplinary theorization of memory politics, this insightful Handbook brings varied literatures into a focused dialogue on the ways in which the past is remembered and how these influence transnational, interstate, and global politics in the present.