Expert Witnesses and International War Crimes Trials: Making Sense of Large-Scale Violence in Rwanda

Abstract

This chapter considers international criminal courts as institutions that produce their own narratives about extreme violence. It also explores war crimes courts as changing social spaces, with their own cultures and dynamics. The chapter argues that the judicial decisions made by the Yugoslav and Rwanda Tribunals in the early stages of their work were shaped by a meta-narrative about the nature of large-scale conflict that predominated in the 1990s. Expert witness evidence on the social and political contexts of the conflicts provided the tribunals with a particular form of knowledge that allowed them to make sense of the conflicts in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in terms consonant with this meta-narrative. This chapter then explores the role of expert knowledge at the Rwanda Tribunal, and in particular, the expert testimony of Alison Des Forges. Comparing two important cases before the Rwanda Tribunal, Akayesu and Bagasora, the chapter explores the ways in which Des Forges' expert evidence was influential in shaping the work of the Tribunal and its understanding of the causes and consequences of the 1994 genocide.