Weiss examines the moral choices that accompanied the military, humanitarian, and diplomatic dilemmas of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and offers prescriptions for reconciling moral imperatives with political and operational constraints.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This (...) represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunal’s public discourse can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has “irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law” and lists six specific achievements: “Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law”. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of ‘achievement’ actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY. (shrink)

The tradition of international criminal tribunals which started with the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals was returned with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. As a result of the bloody wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Security Council of the United Nations decided to establish the ICTY as an ad hoc tribunal, that was approved by the resolutions 808 and 827. The main purpose of the paper is to highlight (...) the features of the ICTY during its mandate from 1993 to 2017. For the realization of this research are used qualitative methods, based on the bibliography that is related with international criminal law, with special emphasis with the activities of international criminal tribunals. Furthermore, some data are also collected from the credible internet sources, which have valuable information about the procedures of the ICTY and for the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. The results of the study demonstrate that during its mandate, the ICTY was accompanied with a lot of successes which distinguish it from the other international criminal tribunals. At the same time, the ICTY has also a lot of failures, which have come as a result of various political influences within it. The conclusions of this paper aim to increase knowledge about the activity of the ICTY, by offering important information for its establishment and organs, and for its main successes and failures. (shrink)

RESUMEN: El presente artículo tiene por objetivo analizar desde una perspectiva feminista las similitudes y diferencias existentes entre los Tribunales Ad-hoc para Ruanda y la Antigua Yugoslavia relacionados con los crímenes relativos a violencia sexual y violación. Analizando los componentes que afectan la determinación de dichos crímenes como son el consentimiento y el contexto y su tipificación internacional: Genocidio y lesa humanidad. ABSTRACT: The present article aims to analyze from a feminist point of view the similarities and differences between (...) the Ad-hoc Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia related sexual violence and rape crimes. PALABRAS CLAVE: Ruanda, Ex-Yugoslavia, violencia sexual, lesa humanidad, genocidio, violación, consentimiento, contexto. KEYWORDS: Rwanda, Ex- Yugoslavia, sexual violence, crimes against humanity, genocide, rape, contentment, coercion, context. (shrink)

Until a decade ago, a comprehensive contestation of the so-called?transitional? paradigm was largely missing in the post-socialist era. This reality changed in the last ten years, especially in the region of former Yugoslavia. Some social movements in this region have started questioning the very essence of the economic and social misconceptions of the post-socialist condition. This paper first provides an elaboration of the very conceptual edifice of the ruling paradigm, as well as a theoretical and methodological framework. It (...) goes on to map out the epistemic discursive content of the respective social movements in Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo, thereby assessing the conceptual content of their critique of the post-socialist transitional paradigm. Finally, given the similarities between Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the paper seeks to explain variations in the critique by how the structural and contextual features impact the perspective from which it is constructed. (shrink)

On 25 May 1993 the United Nations Security Council took the extraordinary and unprecedented step of deciding to establish the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as a mechanism for the restoration and maintenance of international peace and security. This was an extremely significant innovation in the use of mandatory enforcement powers by the Security Council, and the manifestation of an explicit link between peace and justice - politics and law. The establishment of ad hoc tribunals for (...) the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda was followed by the adoption of the Rome Statute of the ICC in July 1998, the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London in October 1998, and the establishment of ad hoc tribunals in Cambodia, Sierra Leone, and East Timor, all of which pointed to an emerging norm of international criminal justice. The key to understanding this is the relationship between the political mandate and the judicial function. The Tribunal was established as a tool of politics, but it was a judicial, not a political tool.This book provides a systematic examination of the Tribunal, what it is, why it was established, how it functions, and where its significance lies. The central question is whether an international judicial institution, such as the Tribunal, can operate in a highly politicized context and fulfill an explicit political purpose, without the judicial process becoming politicized. Separate chapters chart the origins of the court, the process of establishment, jurisdiction, procedure, state co-operation, including obtaining custody of accused, and the role and function of the Chief Prosecutor. This last element is the key to the Tribunal's success in maintaining a delicate balancing act so that its external political function does not impinge on its impartial judicial status, and instead enhances its effectiveness. The book concludes with an assessment of the conduct of the Milosevic case to date. (shrink)

RESUMEN: La labor del Tribunal Penal Internacional para la Ex-Yugoslavia tuvo un momento importante en la compresión del principio de legalidad, como principio básico en la garantía de los derechos humanos, al enfrentar no sólo el derecho consuetudinario como fuente de derecho sino también diferentes modos o enfoques en la identificación de este derecho consuetudinario. Esta relación debe ser analizada a la luz de las limitaciones que tiene el derecho internacional y, sobre todo, de los procedimientos de creación de (...) normas. No resulta fácil exigir responsabilidad en el cumplimiento del derecho internacional humanitario y de los derechos humanos. La práctica de este Tribunal abre una vía para la reflexión con la finalidad de asegurar el respeto de los derechos humanos en cualquier circunstancia, incluso de aquellos que llevaron a cabo la comisión de graves crímenes contra la comunidad internacional.ABSTRACT: The work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was important for understanding the principle of legality as a key principle on the guarantee of Human Rights. The former was due to the Tribunal’s work on having faced the customary law as a source of law using different perspectives for its identification. The link between customary law, principle of legality and human rights has to be analyzed taking in account the limits of International law and the procedures for creating legal norms. It is not easy to invoke responsibility in the fulfillment of international humanitarian law and international law of human rights. The practice developed by this Tribunal provides an avenue for thinking about ensuring the respect of the human rights in any case including the commission of grave crimes against international community. PALABRAS CLAVE: derecho internacional de los derechos humanos, principio de legalidad, derecho internacional humanitario, costumbre internacionalKEYWORDS: international law of human rights, principle of legality, international humanitarian law, international custom. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the experiences of women who found refuge in Serbia during the war in the former Yugoslavia. I look at the women's experiences of both leaving home and coping with everyday life in refuge. The exploration of refugee women's experiences is mainly based on analyses of their own stories, which I collected while researching women and war. In spite of all the hardship of their lives, refugee women who fled to Serbia have been treated (...) by Western media, the public and aid organizations as ‘UNPEOPLE’ or as non-existent. Making their experiences visible as women, refugees and citizens is the main purpose of this article. (shrink)

This paper contains some of the most important results obtained from surveys on domestic violence in Serbia and Macedonia, as well as from a survey on violence against women in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. These surveys have confirmed the results of other research showing that wife abuse is one of the most serious yet at the same time most hidden forms of victimization. It represents the manifestation of power and control over the victim, leading to a loss of (...) trust and a threat to safety. Bearing that in mind, the aim of this paper is to examine the prevalence, structure and some features of wife abuse in the post-war societies of the former Yugoslavia, based on an analysis of the results of these surveys, with particular emphasis on the impact of the economic crisis and war on this phenomenon. (shrink)

Although the quasi-confederal character of Yugoslavia, especially after the introduction of its 1974 constitution did not encourage the development of a genuine Yugoslavian public sphere wherepublic debate could transcend ethnic and republic divisions, it nevertheless allowed the formation of what could be called Yugoslav cultural space, a space within which social and political actors forged their identities regardless of the ethnic or national diversity that characterised their membership. However, the existence of this 'space' had a limited impact in Yugoslav (...) politics partly due to the breakdown of inter-republic communication and the fragmentation of the Yugoslavian mass media. This paper traces the process of disintegration of the Yugoslav cultural space and the emergence of national 'public spheres' in the republics and provinces of former Yugoslavia and attempts to assess the role of the mass media and cultural institutions in these developments by identifying the key strategies of representation employed in the process of the fragmentation and 'nationalisation' of the public sphere of former Yugoslavia. (shrink)

A common theme from certain circles during the Yugoslav wars was that the seceding republics lacked a right to secede, but that if a right were accorded them by the EC or international community, it would have to be granted to the Serbian minorities in these republics, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on pain of inconsistency. This microcosm argument is in fact unsound. On a reasonable conception of a right of self-determination and secession elaborated here, the Republic of Bosnia and (...) Herzegovina enjoyed a right of secession, while Bosnian Serbs did not. Nor did Bosnian Serbs restrict their claim to such a right to territories in which they held a majority; rather, they demanded "secession" for a whole swathe of lands which lacked even a Serb plurality before their brutal "ethnic cleansing". Either voluntarist or ethnicist conceptions of a right of secession might have been construed as supporting the microcosm argument, but both of those are terrible conceptions of the right of self-determination and secession. (shrink)

The authors examine the “second shift” in the former socialist Yugoslavia through the analysis of 1989-90 data from a random sample of 7,790 adults in the paid labor force. Despite working outside the home, women are primarily responsible for housework. Neither education, occupation, urbanization, nor participation in the informal economy has a significant effect in reducing this; only the presence of an older female in the household measurably reduces an employed woman's participation in the second shift. Not only (...) are men's attitudes important for women's performance of the second shift but also men's ability to act in terms of this value displays the significance of a gendered social structure in socialist societies. (shrink)

Rad predstavlja pregled filozofskih casopisa i casopisa iz drugih drustvenih i humanistickih nauka, te drugih?opstekulturnih? casopisa u kojima su objavljivani strucni filozofski prilozi. Pregled obuhvata casopise koji su izlazili u Srbiji i u bivsim jugoslovenskim republikama u periodu od pojavljivanja prvog stampanog casopisa iz oblasti filozofije -?Arhiva za filosofiju, pedagogiju i drustvene nauke? objavljenog 1898. godine pa do danasnjih dana, kada se pokrecu nova?elektronska? izdanja ili se, pak, stara izdanja?prevode? na nove medije i prezentuju putem interneta. Analizirani casopisi su objavljivani (...) na srpskohrvatskom, srpskom, hrvatskom, slovenackom, albanskom i madjarskom jeziku ili su visejezicni, i nalazili su se ili se nalaze u fondovima biblioteka drzave koja je cesto mijenjala naziv i uredjenje, od Kraljevine Srbije do Republike Srbije. (shrink)

After more than a dozen years of activity, some 161 indictments, 64 arrests, and 47 surrenders, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has accomplished a good deal in terms of its primary task of prosecution. Nonetheless, there is still much debate over the state of transitional justice in the Balkans and what has been accomplished. We cannot forget that the ICTY was created with broad political and social purposes in mind, specifically to contribute to the (...) restoration and maintenance of peace. Using a comparative framework, we develop benchmarks of transitional justice outcomes to examine these vague but important and ambitious goals. Although conventional wisdom says that the ICTY is used instrumentally by Balkan leaders who are fundamentally opposed to the court’s existence, we demonstrate that there is also evidence of broader political and social change throughout the region. Thus, we contend that Balkan countries have indeed moved beyond mere prosecution. (shrink)

Although former Yugoslavia constituted what was widely held to be the most "promising" communist country in terms of potentials for economic reform and political democratization, Serbia remained the only East European country in which the former communist elite managed to defeat its opponents in a series of elections and preserve important elements of institutional and ideological continuity with the old system. Moreover, its regime played a conspicuous role in Yugoslavia's violent collapse. In the specialist literature, the (...) "Serbian exceptionalism" thesis has been elaborated in a number of forms. These are critically reviewed in the first part of the paper, classifying the paradigms according to whether they emphasize: 1) Serbian traditionalist, authoritarian, and collectivist political culture, 2) the affinity between traditional Serbian national populism, Russophile anti-Westernism, and communism, 3) the exclusivist and assimilating character of Serbian nationalism, or 4) the appeals of the contemporary Serbian political elite led by S. Milosevic. In the second part of the paper an alternative explanation is presented that seeks to be both interpretively adequate and causally plausible. It rests on five basic factors: 1) historical legacy ; 2) institutional analysis ; 3) ideology ; 4) leadership and social base ; and 5) the role of the Diaspora.. Iako se pre 1990. smatralo da bivsa Jugoslavija medju svim komunistickim zemljama ima najbolje potencijale za ekonomsku reformu i politicku demokratizaciju, Srbija je ostala jedina istocnoevropska zemlja u kojoj je nekadasnjoj komunistickoj eliti poslo za rukom da porazi svoje protivnike u nekoliko uzastopnih izbornih nadmetanja i da ocuva znacajne elemente institucionalnog i ideoloskog kontinuiteta sa starim sistemom. Stavise, taj je rezim igrao krupnu ulogu u nasilnom raspadu SFRJ. U specijalistickoj literaturi, teza o "srpskoj izuzetnosti" razvijana je u razlicitim formama, cijem kritickom razmatranju je posvecen prvi deo rada. Identifikovano je nekoliko paradigmi, u zavisnosti od toga da li osnovni naglasak stavljaju na: 1) tradicionalisticku, autoritarnu i kolektivisticku politicku kulturu Srba, 2) afinitet izmedju tradicionalnog srpskog nacionalnog populizma, rusofilskog antizapadnjastva i komunizma, 3) ekskluzivisticku i asimilacionisticku prirodu srpskog nacionalizma, ili pak 4) odlike savremene srpske politicke elite na celu sa S. Milosevicem. U drugom delu rada izlozio je alternativno objasnjenje, ciji su glavni oslonci: 1) istorijsko nasledje, 2) institucionalna analiza, 3) ideologija, 4) osobine vodja i drustvena baza i 5) uloga dijaspore.. (shrink)

When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted the Bosnian Serb soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war of violating the human right to sexual self determination and of crimes against humanity, it transformed vulnerability from a mark of feminine weakness to a shared human condition. The court's judgment directs us to note the ways in which the exploitation of our bodied vulnerability is an assault on our dignity. It alerts us to the ways (...) in which the body of human rights law is a law of bodies; to the ways in which our desire for intimacy creates communal ties that ground our personal and social identities; to the ways in which the symbolic meanings of our bodies are integral to our sense of integrity and worth; and to the ways in which gender structures which position men as protectors of women make it possible for rape to be used as an effective and criminal weapon of war. (shrink)

In this book, Barbora Moormann-Kimáková analyses the possibility of finding an optimal language regime in multinational and multiethnic countries - either by defining the contents of an optimal language regime, or with the help of a criterion enabling to evaluate whether a language regime is optimal or not. The process of the selection or change of a language regime often becomes a matter of a language-related conflict. These conflicts are mostly accompanied by other political or social conflicts, as for example (...) in Ukraine or former Yugoslavia, which render solutions - and their evaluation - difficult. The author claims that language regimes can be evaluated based on the increase or lack of their legitimacy in the eyes of the relevant actors. This is demonstrated in four language regime studies on the European Union, Soviet Union, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and South Africa. Content The search for the optimal language regime The conflict potential of multilingualism Actors in language-related conflicts The dimensions of language-related conflicts Monolingualism Multilingualism without and with a lingua franca Target Groups - Lecturers and students of the social sciences, humanities and sociolinguistics. - Readers interested in language-related political issues and diversity politics. About the Author Barbora Moormann-Kimáková received her doctorate in political science from the Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. (shrink)

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital (...) mutilation; and reproductive rights. (shrink)

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics (...) of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. -/- Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Basak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis. (shrink)

The first part of this article discusses recent skepticism about character traits. The second describes various forms of virtue ethics as reactions to such skepticism. The philosopher J.-P. Sartre argued in the 1940s that character traits are pretenses, a view that the sociologist E. Goffman elaborated in the 1950s. Since then social psychologists have shown that attributions of character traits tend to be inaccurate through the ignoring of situational factors. (Personality psychology has tended to concentrate on people's conceptions of personality (...) and character rather than on the accuracy of these conceptions). Similarly, the political theorist R. Hardin has argued for situational explanations of bloody social disputes in the former Yugoslavia and in Africa, rather than explanations in terms of ethnic hatred for example. A version of virtue ethics might identify virtues as characteristics of acts rather than character traits, as traits consisting in actual regularities in behavior, or as robust dispositions that would manifest themselves also in counterfactual situations. (shrink)

Evil is a poorly understood phenomenon. In this provocative 2005 book, Professor Vetlesen argues that to do evil is to intentionally inflict pain on another human being, against his or her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm. Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channeled, or exploited, into collective evildoing. He argues that such evildoing, pitting whole groups against each other, springs from a combination of character, situation, and social (...) structure. By combining a philosophical approach inspired by Hannah Arendt, a psychological approach inspired by C. Fred Alford and a sociological approach inspired by Zygmunt Bauman, and bringing these to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Vetlesen shows how closely perpetrators, victims, and bystanders interact, and how aspects of human agency are recognized, denied, and projected by different agents. (shrink)

This book comprises a selection of William McBride's essays on theory and practice in the former Yugoslavia, 1989 - 1999. It continues the critical assessment of neoliberal globalization from the vantage point of its effects on East-Central and Southern Europe that McBride presented in Philosophical Reflections. Unlike the earlier book, it situates discussions of globalization and neonationalist wars against the backdrop of the history, development, and demise of Praxis Philosophy — the one-time bridge between the progressive forces of (...) former Yugoslavia and various East-West initiatives. (shrink)

The UN Security Council adopted sanctions as a means of addressing unrest in Haiti, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Somalia. Damrosch examines this shift from unilateral to collective enforcement and assesses the moral legitimacy and conclusive results of this policy.

Violence against women has been a topic engaging feminist legal scholars for a long time, with a renewed feminist advocacy emerging to highlight sexual violence experienced by women during the armed conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the early 1990s. One of the most important legal developments to emerge from this has been the creation of the office of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, its Causes and Consequences, as part of a series of developments (...) at the UN level that finally accorded explicit recognition to violence against women as a human rights concern. In May 2015, Dr. Daniela Nadj interviewed UN Special Rapporteur, Professor Rashida Manjoo, during her visit to give the annual lecture at the Criminal Justice Centre, Queen Mary, University of London. The interview, an edited version of which is presented here, addressed broad themes including the meaning of liberation for women, especially in a post-conflict setting, the pervasive socio-economic inequality faced by women as an enduring obstacle to equality around the world, the normativity gap on violence against women, academic activism, and the politics of legal information. (shrink)

Nationalism has been a cause of great misery in the world. In this century alone we have seen a number of hideous forms of nationalism leading to genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced relocations, and civil wars. The violent conflicts between Serbians, Croatians, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia; the Hutus and the Tutsis in Central Africa; Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East; Afrikaners, Zulus, and Xhosas in Southern Africa; and the Nazis and non-Aryans, are just some of these.

This contribution to the MLG-debate wants to focus on the question of legitimate authority for the use of military force in the framework of international interventions. More in particular, it is the main objective of this article to verify whether the international intervention in Former Yugoslavia was characterised by a sufficient legitimate authority quality. The analysis itself will be developed in two steps. In a first step, we will describe the three main approaches to the concept of the (...) legitimate authority in the post Cold War literature. Secondly, it is our intention to apply these three legitimate authority approaches in the context of the international intervention in Former Yugoslavia. The final results of this study allow us to formulate a rather remarkable conclusion from an ethical point ofview. Due to the reluctance of the international community to use military force, the central issue concerning the legitimate authority debate no longer seems to be "who among the many candidates has the right to intervene?", but rather 'who has the duty to do so?". (shrink)

Law and History contains a collection of essays by prominent legal historians, which explore the ways in which history has been used by lawyers past and present to answer legal questions. In common with earlier volumes in the Current Legal Issues series, it seeks both a theoretical and methodological focus. This volume covers a broad range of topics, from a discussion of the nature of norms in the middle ages to the role of war crimes trials in the twentieth century. (...) It includes wide-ranging historiographical discussions, which examine the nature and aims of the legal historian, as well as contributions which explore the methodology and aims of writers such as Coke, Maine, Weber, Montesquieu, and Kames, who sought to use historical models to explain law. A number of contributions examine developments in legal doctrine, particularly in the nineteenth century, including developments in the law of contract, administrative law, and perjury. These raise important questions about the nature of the legal categorizations which developed in that era. Law and History also includes a collection of contributons on the use of history in twentieth century trials, including the Nuremberg trials, the trial of the Gang of Four, and trials arising from the events in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. (shrink)

abstract In this paper I consider the nature of the purported vice of moralism by examining two examples that, I suggest, exemplify this vice: the first from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter; the second from David Owen's account of his experience as European negotiator between the warring parties in the former Yugoslavia. I argue that in different ways both these examples show the kind of human weakness or failure that is involved in the most extreme version of moralism, (...) a weakness that involves an inability to see or acknowledge those one seeks to judge as real, morally accountable, human beings. (shrink)

L’interprétation d’un acte de violence de masse est toujours délicate puisqu’elle confère un certain statut au groupe visé. Ce statut peut devenir un facteur important dans la décision de la communauté internationale de reconnaître ou non l’indépendance d’un groupe et de son territoire. Cet article examine le cas de la reconnaissance du Kosovo par la communauté internationale, en février 2008, et soutient que cette reconnaissance a été rendue possible par l’utilisation d’arguments basés sur le statut collectif de victime de nettoyage (...) ethnique détenu par la population albanaise du Kosovo. L’article comble le fossé entre, d’un côté, la théorie de la sécession comme réparation, et de l’autre, les travaux sur la violence de masse contre les groupes ethnonationaux. L’analyse montre que la pratique de la reconnaissance étatique a été réorientée vers un critère restrictif lié au type de violence subie par le groupe réclamant l’indépendance. Dans cette optique, le territoire devient une forme tangible de compensation pour les injustices subies, ce qui tranche par rapport à la pratique antérieure de la reconnaissance étatique dans l’ex-Yougoslavie et ailleurs.The interpretation of an act of mass violence is always a contentious issue since it confers a certain status to the targeted group. This status may become an important factor in the international community’s decision to recognize or not the independence of a group and its territory. This article examines the case of Kosovo’s February 2008 recognition by the international community and argues that this recognition was made possible by the summoning of arguments based on Kosovo Albanians’ collective status as victims of ethnic cleansing. The article bridges the gap between on the one hand the Remedial Right theory of secession, and on the other hand, works on mass violence against ethnonational groups. The article shows that the practice of state recognition was reoriented towards a restrictive criterion linked to the type of violence sustained by the group claiming independence. Under this interpretation, territory becomes a tangible form of compensation for suffered injustices, which contrasts with earlier practice of state recognition in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. (shrink)

The United Nations ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had primacy over national judicial agents for crimes committed in these countries during the most notorious civil wars and genocide of the 1990s. The UN Charter granted the Security Council the right to establish a tribunal for Yugoslavia in the context of ongoing civil war and against the will of recalcitrant national agents. The Council used that same right to punish individuals responsible for a genocide (...) that it failed earlier to prevent in Rwanda. In both cases the Council delegated a portion of its coercive title to independent tribunal agents, thereby overriding the default locus of punishment in the world order: sovereign states. (shrink)

International criminal tribunals established by the UN Security Council in the 1990s have been widely acclaimed as active participants in the modern system of dynamic criminal justice. One of their best known achievements is the prosecution of rape and sexual assaults. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set an example for other tribunals to follow. By interpreting a variety of international laws, the community of international legal professionals (...) has been able to shift the prevailing understanding of rape and sexual violence away from that of an “unfortunate byproducts of war.” Not only has the epistemic community of legal professionals been able to end impunity for these crimes, but case-law of international tribunals has become a basis for subsequent trials at quasi-international tribunals. Decisions of the tribunals have been instrumental in drafting the Statute of the International Criminal Court and can be regarded as an example of the formation of new international norms by means of judicial decisions. (shrink)

I finished the first draft of this lecture just before the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia began — a campaign that provides, I think, a prime example of the failure of international society. A double failure in this case: its political agencies were not able to respond in a timely fashion to the disaster of the former Yugoslavia, and then they were not able to find a more effective form of military intervention. The problem both times wasn't one (...) of organization but of political will, and I am afraid that I won't have much to say in this lecture about how to solve it. No doubt there are organizational structures that lend themselves to swift and strong action in a crisis.But these structures can as easily produce reckless and cruel acts as wise ones, and so we need to limit their powers. And then, properly limited, they may not act at all. This dilemma is an old one, and my way of dealing with it — which, as you will see, is to multiply structures and agents in the hope that somewhere, somehow, someone will do the right thing — will certainly seem inadequate. I concede immediately that I cannot produce an organizational chart showing how a decision to act rightly in international society would be deliberated, and decided, and then resolutely carried out. There is no such procedural or organizational solution; we have to think instead of a political strategy for coping with crises and for creating the sorts of agents that might cope successfully. That's my goal. It doesn't answer to the urgency of the daily news, but these days nothing could answer.I imagine the possible political arrangements of international society as if they were laid out along a continuum marked off according to the degree of centralization. Obviously, there are alternative markings: the recognition and enforcement of human rights could also be measured along a continuum, as could democratization, economic laissez-faire, welfare provision, pluralism, and so on. But I think that focusing on centralization is the best way of opening a discussion of international politics and the quickest way to reach all the other political and moral questions, above all the classical question: what is the best or the best possible regime? What constitutional goals should we set ourselves in an age of globalization?My plan is to present seven possible regimes or constitutions or political arrangements. I will do this discursively, without providing a list in advance, but I do want to list the criteria against which the seven arrangements have to be evaluated: these are their capacity to promote peace, distributive justice, cultural pluralism, and individual freedom. Obviously, within the scope of a single lecture, I will have to deal much too briefly and summarily with some of the arrangements and some of the criteria. This is especially regrettable since the criteria turn out to be inconsistent with, or at least in tension with, one another. So my argument will be complicated, and could be, probably should be, much more so. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to present the outlines of the reception and the influence of Heidegger’s philosophy on the territory of former Yugoslavia. This reception and influence were in their essence co-conditioned by specific political, social and cultural circumstances in the region, which were throughout accompanied by “the syndrome of dehumanization”. The confrontation with Heidegger’s philosophy is therefore co-defined by the profoundly experienced crisis of European humanity. During both world wars the attempt of an overcoming of (...) this crisis of humanity by the means of phenomenological and existentialist philosophy was the main focus of attention. The period after the Second World War is denoted by the linking of Marxism with Heidegger’s attempt to surpass philosophy as metaphysics through the perspective of the history of being; in this context we specifically discuss the Praxis philosophical school and the original philosophical thought of Vanja Sutlić. During the disintegration of Yugoslavia and in the period thereafter, besides the intensive appropriation of Heidegger’s thought through translations and interpretations, which also led to the thorough study of Slavic philosophical terminologies, post-Heideggerian ways of thinking came to the fore, together with the possibility for a new humanization within the wider European and global social framework. (shrink)

This paper addresses the representation of violence in the film In the Land of Blood and Honey, which was directed by Angelina Jolie (2011). Internationally hailed, awarded but also hugely criticized, the film purports to be about rape camps where Muslim women were held and assaulted by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian war. However, the film merges the story of rape camps with a story about a (sexual) relationship between an incarcerated Muslim woman and a Serb camp commander. Our (...) paper analyzes the cinematic tools used to tell these two stories, focusing on what is referred to as borrowing, and suggests that Jolie borrowed liberally to tell her story. The article focuses on three types of borrowing, cinematic, literary and experiential, and looks at three visual cinematic tropes obtained from Holocaust movies, Cold War movies, and ex-Yugoslav cinematic productions. It is concluded that the film recycles an already largely discarded narrative of “a history of ethnic hatred” as prime cause of war in the former Yugoslavia. The film’s director thus misses an opportunity to challenge the ethnicization of the region – something many local film directors have already successfully achieved. (shrink)

International law scholars and lawyers can rely on The Global Community Yearbook to better understand the wealth of case law now emanating from international courts and tribunals. Two new volumes each year include in-depth articles addressing topics of jurisprudence, while shorter notes explore current legal issues and provide context for the year's cases, which comprise the majority of the set. The editor, Giuliana Ziccardi Capaldo, has assembled a comprehensive look at the present and future development of the international legal order. (...) Each major international court or tribunal has its own section, which includes an introductory article on the activity of that organization over the course of the year. The activities of the court and tribunals are presented in the form of "legal maxims," that distil the most important elements of the legal decisions of the past year and that provide researchers with quick access to the relevant point of law in each case. The cases themselves are indexed within each court's section, and then again in a general index for the entire set. Contributed to by leading legal experts, The Global Community Yearbook addresses the major developments in the courts and tribunals, providing a valuable resource for anyone wishing to better understand the functions, decisions and structure of the international legal courts. International Courts and Tribunals covered include: International Court of Justice International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea WTO Dispute Settlement System International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Court of First Instance and Court of Justice of the European Communities European Court of Human Rights Inter-American Court of Human Rights Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. (shrink)

This paper returns to some themes found in David Mitrany's classical ‘functionalist’ approach to international politics, in order to reconstruct practical principles that might be applied to contemporary politics as well as debates in International Relations and international political theory. It attempts to do this through two moves — ‘restoration’ and ‘contemporary reconstruction’. In restoring some of the insights Mitrany provides us that have been somewhat obscured over time, the paper hopes to demonstrate the ‘function’ behind functionalism — that its (...) core assumptions as an approach (if not ‘theory’) to international politics can prove to be just as instructive today as they were during the several decades of their initial development by Mitrany. Reconstruction, however, is necessitated by the observation that some of Mitrany's aspirations for functional theory — namely that it would produce ‘bonds’ that not only transcend national communities, but provide for the unraveling of the nation-state system as we know it — were a bit utopian. Thus, the paper proposes several avenues to reconstruct classical functionalism for contemporary politics. The paper then discusses three small empirical illustrations where micro-political insights can be extracted and briefly analysed: peace camps, the Regional Cooperation Council of the former Yugoslavia, and a more detailed analysis of the so-called ‘surge’ strategy in the ongoing US-Iraq conflict. It concludes with a two-pronged discussion on how micro-politics might speak to current debates in international political theory, and some mechanisms for securing functional spaces. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.1 (2001) 73-90 [Access article in PDF] The Leader's Two BodiesSlavoj Zizek's Postmodern Political Theology Claudia Breger Over the course of the last decade, Slavoj Zizek and his "Slovenian Lacanian school" have gained renown in the Western theory market. Academics are fascinated not only by Zizek's performances as a speaker, his nondogmatic approach to issues of genre and (inter)mediality, 1 and the "literary" character of his theoretical texts (...) [Laclau, Preface xii], but also by the political turn given to psychoanalysis by the "Slovenian school." Already in his preface to Zizek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Ernesto Laclau wrote that this school's work made Lacanian theory "one of the principal reference points of the so-called 'Slovenia spring'—that is to say the democratization campaigns that have taken place in recent years" [xi]. More than ten years later—after a decade of authoritarian rule, war, and genocide in former Yugoslavia—recent revolutionary events in Serbia once more allow one to hope for a thorough democratization of the region. In a newspaper article evaluating the uprising, however, Zizek warned that these hopes might be premature: while Milosevic could find his new role as "a Serbian Jesus Christ," taking upon him all the "sins" committed by his people, Kostunica and his "democratic" nationalism might represent "nothing but Milosevic in the 'normal' version, without the excess" [Zizek, "Gewalt"]. 2Zizek was not alone in warning that the new government in Yugoslavia might not bring an end to Serbian nationalist politics. The pessimistic scenario Zizek evoked on this occasion, however, was not simply the result of his evaluation of the current political constellation in Serbia. Rather, the fantasy of the necessary return of the leader is connected to his political theory—a theory that does not allow for more optimistic scenarios of democratization and the diminution of nationalism in society. My reading of Zizek's work thus argues for a reevaluation of his theory in terms of its implicit authoritarian politics. The need for such a reevaluation is also suggested by Laclau toward the end of his recent exchange with Judith Butler and Zizek when he admits that "the more our discussions progressed, the more I realized that my sympathy for Zizek's politics was largely the result of a mirage" [Laclau, "Constructing Universality" 292]. Laclau now criticizes Zizek's radical Marxist rhetoric by suggesting that he "wants to do away with liberal democratic regimes" without specifying a political alternative [289], and describes Zizek's discourse as "schizophrenically split between a highly sophisticated Lacanian analysis and an insufficiently deconstructed traditional Marxism" [205]. On [End Page 73] the other hand, he also problematizes Zizek's "psychoanalytic discourse" as "not truly political" [289]. My argument primarily starts from this latter point: the antidemocratic—and, as I will argue, both antifeminist and anti-Semitic—moment of Zizek's theory is to be located not only in the way he performs Marxism, but also in the way he performs Lacanian psychoanalysis. While, in other words, Zizek's skepticism vis-à-vis democracy is obviously informed by, and inseparable from, Marxist critiques of "liberal," "representative" democracy, his failure to elaborate alternative visions of political change towards egalitarian and/or plural scenarios of society cannot be explained solely by his Marxist perspective. Rather, it is Zizek's reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis that does not allow for revisions of the Marxist paradigm toward, for example, a "radical democracy" as suggested by Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.In a chapter entitled "Formal Democracy and Its Discontents" in Looking Awry (1992), Zizek notes that "Lacan predicted a new rise of racism for the coming decades" as early as the 1960s [162]. 3 Zizek interprets this statement in the context of a "fundamental impasse of democracy" [162] created by the fact that the abstraction proper to democracy can never dissolve the "substantial ties"—of ethnicity, nation, and so on—that it negates [164]. 4 According to Zizek, "this constitutive paradox" has to be assumed: "The democratic attitude is always based upon a certain fetishistic... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PEACE EDUCATION AND THE NORTHERN IRISH CONFLICT André Lascaris Dominican Theological Center, Nijmegen The Northern Irish conflict can be interpreted as an anachronism. This is true in many aspects. However, in the last ten years we were confronted with many "anachronistic" conflicts: in former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, Algeria, Colombia, and Afghanistan, to mention only some. In our postmodern times the division of the world into two rather (...) neat halves with two centers of power has gone, the nation state is weakening and in many societies the social glue seems to be losing its cohesive force. We have to live together in pluralistic societies in which we are all a minority at times. Wars between states become less likely, butcivil wars are on the increase. Terrorism becomes a power against which the traditional armies and their weapons are quite useless in spite of many technological developments. The ancient laws concerningthe protection of women and children in wartime are becoming obsolete. Women are invited to get involved in the armed forces. The child soldier is a well-known phenomenon. In our western society a child's world, which exists in isolation from the adult world, is no longer a possibility. Some lessons learned in dealing with theNorthern Irish conflict might turn out to be worthwhile taking up in other situations. In this essay, I reflect with the help ofthe mimetic theory on peace work done by some Dutch people on behalfofNorthern Ireland between 1973 and 1992. The Northern Irish conflict as such is not the subject ofthis paper; the mimetic interpretation of this conflict was admirably covered by people such as Duncan Morrow and the late Frank Wright to which I refer the reader in my bibliography. I will concentrate on the educational aspects ofDutch peace work done in the Northern Irish context. Here it suffices to say that the 136André Lascaris Northern Irish conflict is not a religious one, though religious labels are being used. It is aconflict between two cultures, an Irish one and an AngloSaxon or British one. I. Dutch peace work on behalf ofNorthern Ireland A. A short history In 1973 I was invited to become a member of staff of a conference for influential Northern Irishmen in the Netherlands. Glenn Williams, then secretary general of the KEK (Conference of European Churches) had asked the Dutch Council ofChurches whether it could do something on behalf of Northern Ireland. After some consultation Williams asked the Dutch adult education center 'De Haaf to accommodate "mixed Roman Catholic and Protestant Irish groups in a quiet and spiritual atmosphere." The director of this center, Aat van Rhijn, a Presbyterian minister, asked me to participate in the conference because he wanted a Catholic priest to make the Roman Catholic Northern Irishmen feel represented on the staff. A laywoman, Hermine Keuning, was the third member of the staff. The Dutch Reformed Church provided money. In April 1973 a visit was made to Belfast and contact was established with the Irish Council ofChurches; it soon became our Northern Irish counterpart. In Septembera firstconference was held, quickly followed by a second one. From participants of the first conference a new request for a conference was made and after this one even more conferences were organized, altogether 18 between 1973 and 1983. We worked with neighborhood groups, politicians, paramilitaries, social workers, police officers, adult educators, social workers, journalists and editors, Catholic and Protestant clergymen. In the conferences ofthe protestant politicians and the clergy it was not possible to have a mixed group; we had to be content with having some either Catholic or Protestant "observers" at the conference. Inthe late seventiesthesecurity situation inNorthern Ireland improved. The necessity oftraveling to the Netherlands to have a conference became less evident. Because our work remained in demand, we organized weekends in Northern Ireland itself from 1981 onwards, mainly in Corrymeela, an ecumenical adult education center near Ballycastle. Money was coming from several sources, but mainly from the Dutch Reformed Church. To handle the money well we decided in 1975 to become a trust: the "Dutch Northern Irish Advisory Committee." It was typical ofthis trustthat its constitution stipulated that no conference or any Peace Education andthe Northern Irish Conflict137 other activity... (shrink)

The variety and complexity of the eight papers in this Symposium issue are evidence that immigration is a tough nut to crack both as a matter of policy and application. There is no way that any short summary can do justice to these papers, which take a variety of moral, economic, historical, and empirical approaches to some of the recurrent issues in the field, so it is best in this short issue to try to situate the problem in a general (...) classical liberal context, to show where the pressure points are most likely to appear.The initial way to approach this problem is to start with the simple proposition that the world today is divided into national territories where the practical norm is well-nigh universal: That each sovereign state has exclusive control over its own territory, which, among other things, allows it to decide which individuals are members of that state. These citizens have privileges that may be exercised, no questions asked, on such key matters as entering labor markets, owning property, voting, and otherwise participating in political affairs. All these activities may be denied or granted, at will, to any and all outsiders by the territorial sovereign.No one doubts the need for having some form of territorial control. The need to have some monopoly of force could not be achieved if the entire world, with its infinite diversity of locations and populations, were under a single sovereign. Indeed, in many cases, the divisions within a given country may be so pronounced that separation rather than aggregation is the norm. Thus, at the end of the British Raj, India split into India and Pakistan, and later Pakistan split into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Less dramatically, Czechoslovakia split into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, while the former Yugoslavia split into five nations, starting from the northwest: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Macedonia. Clearly, these ethic differences, be they large or small, are a major obstacle to the expansion of the size of the state. And today, the territorial instinct reasserts itself as the member states of the European Union impose more restrictions on immigration.Yet at the same time, the normative foundations of this system seem elusive. There is the following deep skepticism about the importance of these borders, expressed in these essays by Jeremy Waldron and Ilya Somin, that these national boundary lines should have such a pronounced role in political economy. Michael Blake pursues this theme further by asking the extent to which classical liberals can justify exclusion through the use of violence—or is it force? The inquiry into the dominant role of territoriality can then be expanded, as by Peter Margulies, to examine all sorts of negative externalities that could be created both by easy and strict rules of admission.Taken as a whole, there is no doubt that these national barriers are a serious obstacle to the free trade in goods and services between two individuals, one inside the boundary and one outside. The general view is that these barriers block the gains from trade, which is what drives economic progress, so that ideally all tariffs and quantitative restrictions should give way to a system of free trade in which petty objections by domestic competitors of foreign firms should not dictate local policies.It should, of course, be evident that powerful conflicting forces on free trade and protectionism ebb and flow over time. It should therefore come as no surprise that the stakes are even higher where what is at stake is the movement of people across national boundaries. The loss to any given country from keeping out potential citizens can be enormous, and we see powerful political forces clamp down on open immigration, so many of these gains from trade are lost. The situation can be even more heartbreaking when the ability to leave a country exposes innocent people to imprisonment or death.So what is the explanation for so many nations closing their borders? Much of the explanation comes from old-fashioned protectionism. Your computer programmers will take the jobs of our specialists. There is all sorts of occupational licensing and other barriers to entry within a domestic economy, so there is no reason to expect that these forces will not exert even greater influence against outsiders who do not, after all, have a voice in the local economy and who, therefore, as Alex Nowrasteh, Michael Howard, and Andrew Forrester observe, have little ability to influence domestic policy even after they enter a country. In addition, as Gabriel Chin discusses, strong racial prejudices also lead to exclusions from the domestic economy. Not only are there objections in, say, the United States and much of Western Europe, of exclusion on straight racial grounds, as exemplified by Chinese exclusion acts. The force of these exclusions are also subject to political change. Thus, the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Johnson-Reed Act) was part of a white supremacist program, which gave way two decades later to a very different legal regime with the Immigration Act of 1965, which put an end to the venerable system of national-origin quotas.Yet two other reasons for exclusion are constantly at issue. Immigrants not only bring in their labor but also their families, cultures, and traditions that, in public spaces, may clash with local norms and cultures on such elementary and critical matters as to whether women should dress modestly and wear head coverings. Will freewheeling Danes and Swedes feel comfortable if large numbers of Muslims continue their traditional practices with strong barriers between men and women? There are no obvious market mechanisms that will mitigate these issues, and the situation becomes even more fraught if there are large welfare or educational costs that fall, at least in the short run, on local citizens. These are compounded by the fact that immigrants will typically gain political rights that could easily skew the balance of political power between established and newly arrived ethnic groups by altering the outcome of national and local elections. And letting people in is not just done on a simple open-borders policy. Thus, in many countries, as Lance Pritchett discusses, there is the controversial option of letting foreigners in on short-term labor visas that require them to leave after a certain period. And there are further questions about whether people should be deported if they lied on their entry applications or committed some crime while in the new country, as has occurred in the United States. The numbers of cases can be high and their complexity great, so it is fair to ask, along with Jill Family, whether some self-conscious exceptions to the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, analogous statutes elsewhere, should be regarded as part of the new normal.It is therefore necessary to deal with the thrust and counterthrust on all these issues. It is also fair to ask whether classical liberalism has a distinctive view on these issues, or whether the combination of private gains and multidirectional externalities gives rise to empirical questions that, as always, require further reflection, even when certain situations—the major influx of illegal immigrants on the US southern border—will generate such powerful emotions that detached intellectual inquiry is ever more difficult. We cannot answer these questions, and thus offer to you a set of essays that take a stab at these difficult topics. (shrink)