Can international justice contribute to
strengthening sustainable cultures of peace?
The case of former Yugoslavia
Guy Elcheroth & Dario Spini
Institute of Social Sciences
University of Lausanne
“The role of the Tribunal cannot be overemphasized. Far
from being a vehicle for revenge, it is a tool for promoting
reconciliation and restoring true peace. If responsibility for
the appalling crimes perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia is
not attributed to individuals, then whole ethnic and religious
groups will be held accountable for these crimes and
branded as criminal. (…) The history of the region clearly
shows that clinging to feelings of "collective responsibility"
easily degenerates into resentment, hatred and frustration
and inevitably leads to further violence and new crimes.”
First annual report of ICTY (1994, p.12)
Overstretching the scope of the tribunal? Critical voices...
• Fletcher & Weinstein (2004): Has the
promise to «heal psychological wounds »
only raised unrealistic expectations ?
• Hartmann (2007): Is there a trade-off
between peace and justice ?
Questioning the relationship between victimization,
justice, and reparation
“While it is very clear that everyone has an
opinion about trials, their relationship to trauma
is obviously less straightforward (...) we need to
be very careful about how we define the term
‘justice’. For many survivors, justice may not
mean trials but a much more personal sense of
what they need in order to move on with their
live.”
(Biro, Ajdukovic, Corkalo, Djipa, Milin, and Weinstein, 2004, p.201)
Trials : an ambivalent experience for victims ?
• A case study in Guatemala (Lykes et al., 2007) :
– During the trials, as compared to other witnesses,
personal victims of political violence expressed more
• Emotional pain, concern, and anxiety
• Preferences to forget events
• Frustration about the trials
– However, community members participating in the
trials more frequently perceived positive effects of
social bonding, created by the shared action
Resistance to impunity: a collective effort to
counter the disintegration of the community ?
« The witnesses (…) were more able to cope by resistance,
which helped to diminish feelings of powerlessness and
defeat that were caused by impunity (…) interactions were
positively viewed as actions of bonding that strengthened
social relationships and communication (…) for many
interviewees who participated in the judicial process, fear
and initial doubt about making an accusation changed to
assertive confrontation though their testimony. The
testimony tended to return to participants a sense of the
value of defending truth, history, and justice. »
Lykes et al. (2007, p.380)
Collective violence, personal trauma, and the social
fabric
• A comparative study across five Guinean communities,
after military incursions from neighbouring forces
(Abramowitz, 2005)
– Higher prevalence of psychological distress in those communities
were central collective practices had vanished
 The indirect effet of war on personal suffering: people withdraw
from social life when they are left unsure about the relevance of
shared values that provide meaning and purpose to social
interactions
Collective violence, moral climates and the
spread of vulnerability
• Archer and Gartner (1987): Homicide rates are
systematically higher within post-war nations than in
the corresponding pre-war societies, especially in
victorious nations
• Rosler, Bar-Tal, Sharvit, Halperin and Raviv (in
press): the moral-social costs of prolonged
occupation for the Israeli society (dysfunctional
judicial system, spreading corruption, diffusion of
violent norms, “banality of brutalization”, and
increasing vulnerability of various minority groups)
From collective vulnerability to collective resilience (I)
Support to legal reactions among non victims
Support to legal reactions among victims of war
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
P
I
Ge
S
or g hili p outh sr ael
pi n
(32
i a(
A
fr
21%
es
(26 ica (2 %)
)
%)
6%
)
El
Sa
lva
do
r
Bo
Bo
Pa
Ab
Ca
Af g
le s
sni Ni ge
sni Leba
mb Soma
ha
ti n kh azi
ria
no
aao
nis
l
i
d
a(
n(
ia n
a(
Fe
Re
ia (
(70
tan
9
8
9
d
p
7
9
Te
%)
0
2%
(6 0
er a
ub
%
(99
5
%
%)
r r.
)
lik
)
ti o
)
%)
%)
(88
aS
n(
r ps
70
%)
%)
ka
(7 7
%)
Contexts, by overall rate of victims
Elcheroth, G. (2006). Individual-level and community-level effects of war trauma on social
representations related to humanitarian law. European Journal of Social Psychology, 39, 907-930.
From collective vulnerability to collective resilience (II)
• Replication of the individual/collective trauma discrepancy
in a first comparative study in the former Yugoslavia
• Specific psychological functions of lending support to
international tribunals in the most war-affected parts
Support for
prosecution
β =.26 ***
Satisfaction with life
(β = .35***)
β=.29***
β=.29***
Belief in a just
world
Elcheroth, G., & Spini, D. (2009). Public support for the prosecution of human rights violations in the
former Yugoslavia. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 15(2), 189 - 214.
Toward a broader theoretical model of public
reactions to human rights violations: Key tenets
1. Public reactions to human rights violations are irreducibly
collective phenomena.
2. The recognition of a common identity makes other people’s
experiences relevant to us.
3. The threat of moral ambiguity and erosion of social bonds
motivates people to commit themselves to clarify core norms
and values.
4. New institutional frameworks (such as the establishment of an
international court) change the practical-experiential
significance of norms and values, by creating new behavioural
options for clarifying norms and values.
 Experiences of collective vulnerability can be facilitative of
subsequent social change, notably when institutional
frameworks for collective reactions exist.
From collective vulnerability to collective resilience (III)
• TRACES (2006): survey with multilevel design
– Geographically stratified survey design: 80 regions covering
the whole former Yugoslavia
 micro-contexts of collective experiences
– Life events calendar survey among a representative sample
of the general adult population (N=3’975)
 basis for the computation of contextual indicators
– Survey on social and political attitudes among a cohort
sample (born 1968-74, N=2’254)
 basis for individual-level variables
Creating contextual indicators, Step 1: Description of the regional location
of traumatising war events
Step 2: Simulation of their psychological impact, assuming that common
identification brings remote events subjectively closer
Step 3: Simulation of the relative salience of traumatising war events, as
compared to social exclusion
Reactions to human rights violations,
inspired by court records
• Violation of humanitarian norms
Case source: International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia
• Violation of judicial rights
Case source: European Court of Human Rights
• Violation of social and economic rights
Case source: European Committee of Social Rights
Condemnation of violations
Support for
legal
prosecution
Support for international justice
Two types of condemnations of human
rights violations
Moral
condemnation
Comparing legal and moral reactions to human rights violations
Support for
prosecution
B
SE
13,00*** 1,10
Intercept
Individual-level explanatory
variables
Victim of war
-0,28 ns
Victim of social-econom. deprivation
0,93*
Woman
-0,70*
Combatant
-1,49**
Sense of anomy
0,33*
Collective guilt acceptance
0,42**
Preserve own dignity and values
1,52***
Fatalist conception of war
-0,58***
Contextual-level explanatory
variables
Collective experiences of war trauma
1,01***
Collective experiences of socialeconomic deprivation
-1,19***
Model enhancement
20,2(2)***
Explained contextual variance
28,7%
Moral
condemnation
B
SE
16,09***
1,00
0,41
0,39
0,35
0,46
0,17
0,12
0,15
0,15
0,48 ns
0,00 ns
0,85**
1,13**
0,47**
-0,80***
0,39**
0,32*
0,37
0,35
0,32
0,41
0,15
0,10
0,13
0,13
0,26
-1,63***
0,25
0,25
1,54***
37,7(2)***
43,8%
0,25
Step 4: Simulation of the psychological impact of traumatising war events,
based on an alternative assumption : common territorial affiliation brings
remote events subjectively closer
sdsdsd
Support for legal prosecution by type of relations underlying collective
experiences
Model 1
B
SE
13,01***
1,10
Individual-level var.
(the same than in previous model)
Contextual-level var.
Collective experiences of war
trauma
1,01**
- weighted by common
identification
- weighted by ethnic similarity
0,04 ns
- weighted by territorial space
- weighted by mobility space
Collective experiences of social
and economic deprivation
-1,25**
- weighted by common
identification
- weighted by ethnic similarity
0,09 ns
- weighted by territorial space
- weighted by mobility space
Model enhancement
0,07(2) ns
Explained contextual variance
0,1%
Model 2
B
SE
12,98***
1,11
Model 3
B
SE
12,94***
1,10
0,36
1,00**
0,30
1,05**
0,29
0,37
-
-0,07 ns
-
0,29
-
-0,23 ns
0,27
0,37
-1,09**
0,38
-1,09**
0,37
0,33
-
-0,13 ns
0,25(2) ns
0,4%
0,36
-
-0,14 ns
0,89(2) ns
1,5%
0,32
Support for legal prosecution by type of human rights violation (i.e. by vignette)
Judicial rights
B
SE
Individual-level var.
(the same than in previous
model)
Contextual-level var.
Collective experiences of war
0,84**
0,27
trauma
Collective experiences of social
-1,14***
0,26
and economic deprivation
Model enhancement
17,99(2)***
Explained contextual variance
31,7%
Social rights
Humanitarian
norms
B
SE
B
SE
0,51(*)
0,29
1,27**
0,37
-0,65*
0,28
-1,55***
0,37
5,30(2) (*)
10,1%
16,72(2)***
23,9%
What have we
learned ?
• Human rights claims are grounded in
collective, rather than individual, experience
of human rights violations.
• The vehicle of such collective experience
underlying public reactions to human rights
violations are (collectively) imagined
communities, which do not necessarily observe
the same boundaries than nation-states or
ethnic groups.
• Human rights violations and their impact on
public concerns are to be conceived as a
system, rather than in isolation.
• The match between international justice
intervening in human rights issues and
prevalent public concerns, lays down the
symbolic grounds for public claims for further
institutionalization of rights.
Simplified narratives of (ethnic) ingroup victimization imply
directed forgetting of (Elcheroth & Spini, forthcoming) :
Final thoughts
•
•
–
–
–
–
intergroup solidarity (Ramanathapillai, 2006)
intragroup violence (Brubaker & Laitin,1998)
ingroup resistance/desertion (Gagnon, 2004)
outgroup suffering (Vollhardt, 2009)
This implies that these constructions can be challenged
(cf. Reicher et al. 2006)
Further, people’s propensity to distance themselves from
exclusive identification to the ‘ingroup’s’ struggle evolves
over stages of conflicts (cf. Spini, Elcheroth & Fasel, 2008)
 The patient work of documenting who gave the orders and
who designed mass atrocities, might stimulate critical
revision of over-simplified narratives of collective agency
(e.g., as completely bounded within ethnic categories)
 There might be specific windows of opportunity for the
transformative power of trials within transitional societies.