Suchergebnisse

The extra-legal effects of international and domestic war crimes trials continue to puzzle researchers and practitioners. In the former Yugoslav states, the legacy of conflict and issues of transitional justice remains central in politics, society and culture. This book provides a new theoretical and methodological approach to one of these puzzles: why universal human rights norms become distorted or undermined when they reach local publics. It investigates the social and cultural contexts that transitional justice processes take place in by looking at how emotional everyday narratives can hamper the spread of norms in society. In Croatia, these narratives define how the public understands the rule of law, history and minority rights. Ivor Sokolić is Research Officer in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.--

Transitional justice is premised on participation that allows local publics to construct, critique and have some ownership over the process. The current scholarship assumes that individuals openly express their views of the process, or that they remain silent. The scholarship has neglected a third, significant form of participation: active withholding of views by saying 'I don't know'. This article examines such claims to ignorance and argues that they can provide insight into participation. While both qualitative and quantitative researchers of transitional justice have observed a pervasive pattern of high 'don't know' responses, such claims to ignorance have not been studied. This article develops a theoretical framework that shows that 'don't know' responses are a valuable source of information and argues that they are often an expression of a lack of willingness to respond, rather than genuine ignorance. Drawing on an original corpus of data collected through inter-ethnic focus groups and surveys conducted in four former Yugoslav countries, the study demonstrates how claims to ignorance are constructed as novel manifestations of resistance, restraint or disentitlement. These point to a rejection of transitional justice, which needs to be addressed if individuals are to feel like legitimate participants in the process.

Transitional justice is premised on participation that allows local publics to construct, critique and have some ownership over the process. The current scholarship assumes that individuals openly express their views of the process, or that they remain silent. The scholarship has neglected a third, significant form of participation: active withholding of views by saying 'I don't know'. This article examines such claims to ignorance and argues that they can provide insight into participation. While both qualitative and quantitative researchers of transitional justice have observed a pervasive pattern of high 'don't know' responses, such claims to ignorance have not been studied. This article develops a theoretical framework that shows that 'don't know' responses are a valuable source of information and argues that they are often an expression of a lack of willingness to respond, rather than genuine ignorance. Drawing on an original corpus of data collected through inter-ethnic focus groups and surveys conducted in four former Yugoslav countries, the study demonstrates how claims to ignorance are constructed as novel manifestations of resistance, restraint or disentitlement. These point to a rejection of transitional justice, which needs to be addressed if individuals are to feel like legitimate participants in the process.

This article, based on the results of focus-group discussions, dyads, and interviews in Croatia, examines how Croatians construct their narrative of the 1992-1995 conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia's role in it. Despite judgements at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluding that the Croatian state intervened in the Bosnian conflict, respondents in this study claimed to be ignorant of any such intervention. What was discussed worked in concert with the dominant Croatian war narrative of Croatian defence, victimhood, and sacrifice in the face of a larger, Serbian aggressor. By portraying the Bosnian conflict as chaotic and savage, respondents differentiated it from the Croatian one and relativised any illicit actions within a framework of nesting orientalism. Croatian involvement in Bosnia-Herzegovina was generally seen as positive: it was viewed in terms of Croatia welcoming Bosniak refugees and providing military assistance, which enabled moral licensing with regard to the rarely mentioned and marginalised negative aspects of Croatia's involvement in the conflict.

AbstractThis paper investigates how Croats view the minority Serb population in Croatia. It is based on focus groups, dyads and interviews conducted in Croatia in 2014 and 2015. Serbs constitute the 'other' to Croatian identity, which is defined primarily through language and religion. The analysis finds that the predominant war narrative related to the 1991–1995 conflict, one of defence against a larger Serbian aggressor, influences both of these notions of identity, as well as perceptions of the Serb minority in the state. Participants displayed contradictory attitudes in a discourse that featured many key facets of the war narrative. Most respondents agreed that Serbs should be equal members of Croatian society, but they also did not believe Cyrillic signs should be put up in Vukovar. The introduction of bilingual signs both reduced trust in government institutions and was interpreted as a continued threat against the Croatian people and state.

This paper investigates perceptions of sources of information on the transitional justice process in Croatia, dealing with the 1991-1995 conflict. This provides an insight into the broader nation-building process in Croatia by analysing where the predominant war narrative is reproduced and contested. It is based on focus group, dyad and interview research conducted in 2014 and 2015 with teachers, members of war veterans' associations and pensioners. Respondents trusted few sources in an atmosphere of general distrust and pessimism towards institutions. Participants in the conflict and images from television were, on the other hand, highly trusted. This paved the way for everyday narratives to have more of an influence than narratives presented from above by institutions, indicating that individuals and organisations concerned with the historical study of the war in Croatia are perceived to be more reliable if they also appeal to these criteria of participation and imagery, regardless of the academic merit of their investigations.

This article is based on the assumption that norms can help better understand one of the expressivist aims of transitional justice, that of building a new narrative about the past. The main argument is that focus groups, as an interactive method of inquiry, are well suited to investigating how this "judicial" narrative interacts with the official and dominant war narrative in Croatia. Focus groups are more adept at this than other methodological approaches since they can effectively reflect independence of opinion; they lead to more truthful answers through spontaneity; they effectively probe taken-for-granted concepts; and they can more easily overcome distrust in post-conflict societies, especially with ex-combatants. The approach faces new challenges in such a situation since recruitment problems, insider/outsider status, and posttraumatic stress disorder, among other ethical concerns, present problems that often arise due to the group process. The powerful and unpredictable effect of the group dynamic can, therefore, provide a deep exploration of social norms, but it can also cause significant upset among participants. In this instance the methodology explores how widely accepted the war narrative is, how it is constructed, and how important the public believes it is not to question it.