Abstract
One of the most pressing concerns of Serbia’s transition to democracy is the question of responsibility for wars and war crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1990. The EU has made Serbia’s integration prospects conditional on its full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Serbia has been notoriously reluctant in cooperating with the Tribunal,1 and by extension it is generally understood to be failing to ‘come to terms with its past’. While at the state level this can be observed through the reluctant ICTY cooperation and lack of engagement with transitional justice on part of various post-Milošević: governments, at the societal level the issue is much more contentious.
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Notes
For example, see J. Subotic (2009) Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press); E. D. Gordy (2005) ‘Postwar Guilt and Responsibility in Serbia: The Effort to Confront it and the Effort to Avoid it’, in S. Ramet and V. Pavlakovic (eds) Serbia since 1989: Politics and Society under Milosevic and After (Washington, DC: University of Washington Press); V. Peskin (2009) International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans: Virtual Trials and the Struggle for State Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
For an overview, see P. Hayner (2011) Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge); W. Lambourne (2008) ‘Transitional Justice and Peacebuilding after Mass Violence’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 3(1), pp. 28–48; R. G. Teitel (2003) ‘Theoretical and International Framework: Transitional Justice in New Era’, Fordham International Law Journal, 26(4), pp. 893–906.
R. Nagy (2008) ‘Transitional Justice as a Global Project: Critical Reflections’, Third World Quarterly, 29(2), pp. 275–89.
These include, for example, R. Mani (2002) Beyond Retribution: Seeking Justice in the Shadow of War (Malden, MA: Polity); K. McEvoy and L. McGregor (eds) (2008) Transitional Justice from Below: Grassroots Activism and the Struggle for Change (Oxford: Hart Publishing); Lambourne (2008), op. cit.
H. G. West (2003) ‘Voices Twice Silenced: Betrayal and Mourning at Colonialism’s End in Mozambique’, Anthropological Theory, 3(3), pp. 343–65, see p. 350.
V. Pupavac (2004) ‘International Therapeutic Peace and Justice in Bosnia’, Social & Legal Studies, 13(3), pp. 377–401, see p. 377.
See, for example, E. Baines (2010) ‘Spirits and Social Reconstruction after Mass Violence: Rethinking Transitional Justice’, African Affairs, 109(436), pp. 409–30.
Normative aspects of transitional justice are discussed by L. Vinjamuri and J. Snyder (2004) ‘Advocacy and Scholarship in the Study of International War Crimes Tribunals and Transitional Justice’, Annual Review of Political Science, 7(1), pp. 345–62.
J. L. Gibson (2006) ‘Can Truth Reconcile Divided Nations?’ in J. D. Meernik and T. David Mason (eds) Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding in Post-War Societies: Sustaining the Peace (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 176–95.
S. Cohen (2001) States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press).
D. A. Crocker (1998) ‘Transitional Justice and International Civil Society: Toward a Normative Framework’, Constellations, 5(4), p. 496.
R. Belloni (2001) ‘Civil Society and Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Journal of Peace Research, 38(2), pp. 163–80; K. Rupesinghe (ed.) (1995) Conflict Transformation (New York: St Martin’s Press); C. Orujela (2003) ‘Building Peace in Sri Lanka: A Role for Civil Society’, Journal of Peace Research, 40(2), pp. 195–212.
P. Kopeckyý and C. Mudde (2003) ‘Rethinking Civil Society’, Democratization, 10(3), pp. 1–14.
J. Mertus (1999) ‘Liberal State vs. the National Soul: Mapping Civil Society Transplants’, Social and Legal Studies, 8(1), pp. 121–46; Belloni (2001), op. cit.
D. Kostovicova (2002) ‘Civil Society and Post-Communist Democratisation: Facing a Double Challenge in Post-Milosevic Serbia’, Journal of Civil Society, 2(1), p. 22.
C. Mercer (2002) ‘NGOs, Civil Society and Democratisation: A Critical Review of Literature’, Progress in Development Studies, 2(1), p. 9.
M. Yerkes (2004) ‘Facing the Violent Past: Discussions with Serbia’s Youth’, Nationalities Papers, 32(4), pp. 921–38, see p. 924.
Z. Miller (2008) ‘Effects of Invisibility: In Search of the “Economic” in Transitional Justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2(3), pp. 266–91, see p. 280.
See, for example, A. McHoul and W. Grace (1999) A Foucault Primer: Discourse, Power and the Subject (Dunedin: University of Otago Press) pp. 30–56.
A similar issue is recorded in Argentina by A. Gandsman (2012) ‘Testimonies of Trauma, Human Rights, and the Reproduction of Conventional Knowledge’, paper presented at the Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence conference, University of Montréal, 24 March.
See, for example, O. Fridman (2011) ‘”It was like Fighting a War with Our Own People”: Anti-War Activism in Serbia during the 1990s’, Nationalities Papers, 39(4), pp. 507–22.
Cf. M. C. Ferme (2001) The Underneath of Things: Violence, History and the Everyday in Sierra Leone (Berkley, CA: University of California Press).
See A. Lüdtke (1993) ‘”Coming to Terms with the Past”: Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany’, Journal of Modern History, 65(3), pp. 542–72.
Subotic (2009), op. cit.; D. Orentlicher (2008) Shrinking the Space for Denial: The Impact of the ICTY in Serbia (New York: Open Society Institute); S. P. Ramet (2007) ‘The Denial Syndrome and its Consequences: Serbian Political Culture Since 2000’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 40(1), pp. 41–58.
S. Logar and S. Bogosavljević (2001) ‘Vidjenje istine u Srbiji’, Reč, 62(8), pp. 7–34.
G. Millar (2010) ‘Assessing Local Experiences of Truth-Telling in Sierra Leone: Getting to “Why” through a Qualitative Case Study Analysis’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 4(3), pp. 477–96, see p. 490; Miller (2008), op. cit., p. 290.
A. L. Smith (2004) ‘Heteroglossia, “Common Sense”, and Social Memory’, American Ethnologist, 1(2), p. 263.
See E. V. Daniel (1996) Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Ewing, NJ: Princeton University Press).
See L. Malkki (1995) Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
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N. Dimitrijevic: (2008) ‘Serbia after the Criminal Past: What Went Wrong and What Should be Done’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2(1), p. 3.
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E. Scarry (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press).
C. Sorabji (1995) ‘A Very Modern War: Terror and Territory in Bosnia- Herzegovina’, in R. Hinde and H. Watson (eds) War: A Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalised Violence (London: I. B. Tauris), p. 82.
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© 2013 Jelena Obradović-Wochnik
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Obradović-Wochnik, J. (2013). Serbian Civil Society as an Exclusionary Space: NGOs, the Public and ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’. In: Bojicic-Dzelilovic, V., Ker-Lindsay, J., Kostovicova, D. (eds) Civil Society and Transitions in the Western Balkans. New Perspectives on South-East Europe Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296252_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137296252_13
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