Afraid to Cry Wolf: Human Rights Activists’ Struggle of Transnational Accountability Efforts in the Balkans

Abstract

Throughout the 1990s the state of Yugoslavia dissolved, ravaged by horrendous conflict. Since, several retributive and restorative mechanisms to cope with past atrocities have been attempted. Human rights activists and civil society organizations have increasingly been involved in these processes. Employing concepts of sociology of spaces, which focuses on the creation of spaces through action and the interdependence of action on spatial structures, we argue that activists move between different spaces constituted by narratives of justice and truth. Different NGOs across the region for instance run trial monitoring and/or witness support programs—examples of activist involvement in legal spatiality. Moreover, recent fact-finding and documenting projects, such as the regional truth commission initiative (RECOM), illustrate efforts to create and expand so-called truth spaces by activists. Challenging existing retributive justice mechanisms to promote a transnational truth commission, however, has been unsuccessful thus far due to internal obstacles within the social movement’s organizational structure as well as the lack of external support. In this chapter we discuss the emergence of human rights activism to account for mass atrocity and trace different factors that have hampered the successful creation of a regional truth space and the institutionalization of the RECOM commission to deal with war crimes and human rights violations that occurred during the 1990s.