Can international criminal justice advance ethnic reconciliation? The ICTY and ethnic relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was created by the United Nations Security Council in 1993 to advance a number of goals including providing justice, deterring human rights atrocities and advancing peace. We investigate the impact of the ICTY on another goal – reconciliation – that lies at the convergence of justice and peace. We suggest that, to the extent the work of the ICTY is favourably viewed by Bosnians, the better the prospects are for reconciliation. The ICTY’s justice and truth can potentially provide a critical basis on which individual judgements about reconciliation will, in part, rest. We test our hypotheses on data from the Southeast Europe Social Survey Project, which contains thousands of observations of survey data from the former Yugoslavia. We find support in our statistical model for our hypotheses regarding the impact of international justice on attitudes reflective of reconciliation.