Can international justice contribute to strengthening sustainable cultures of peace?

The case of former Yugoslavia

Guy Elcheroth & Dario SpiniInstitute 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...

• Hartmann (2007): Is there a trade-off between peace and justice ?

• Fletcher & Weinstein (2004): Has the promise to «heal psychological wounds » only raised unrealistic expectations ?

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)

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.

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Georgia(21%)

Philippines (26%)

South Africa (26%)

Israel (32%)

El Salvador (60%)

Bosnia -Federation (70%)

Nigeria (70%)

Bosnia- Republika Srpska (77%)

Lebanon (82%)

Palestinian Terr. (88%)

Abkhazia (90%)

Cambodia (95%)

Somalia (97%)

Afghanistan (99%)

Support to legal reactions among non victimsSupport to legal reactions among victims of war

Contexts, by overall rate of victims

From collective vulnerability to collective resilience (I)

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.

Support for prosecution

Belief in a just world

Satisfaction with life(β = .35***)

β = .26 ***

β=.29***

β=.29***

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

Toward a broader theoretical model of public reactions to human rights

violations: Key tenets1. 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

• Violation of humanitarian normsCase source: International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

• Violation of judicial rightsCase source: European Court of Human Rights

• Violation of social and economic rightsCase source: European Committee of Social Rights

Reactions to human rights violations, inspired by court records

Two types of condemnations of human rights violations

Condemnation of violations

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Support for legal prosecution

Moral condemnation

Comparing legal and moral reactions to human rights violations

Support for prosecution

Moral condemnation

B SE B SE Intercept 13,00*** 1,10 16,09*** 1,00 Individual-level explanatory variables Victim of war -0,28 ns 0,41 0,48 ns 0,37 Victim of social-econom. deprivation 0,93* 0,39 0,00 ns 0,35 Woman -0,70* 0,35 0,85** 0,32 Combatant -1,49** 0,46 1,13** 0,41 Sense of anomy 0,33* 0,17 0,47** 0,15 Collective guilt acceptance 0,42** 0,12 -0,80*** 0,10 Preserve own dignity and values 1,52*** 0,15 0,39** 0,13 Fatalist conception of war -0,58*** 0,15 0,32* 0,13 Contextual-level explanatory variables Collective experiences of war trauma 1,01*** 0,26 -1,63*** 0,25 Collective experiences of social- economic deprivation -1,19*** 0,25 1,54*** 0,25 Model enhancement 20,2(2)*** 37,7(2)*** Explained contextual variance 28,7% 43,8%

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 Model 2 Model 3 B SE B SE B SE Individual-level var. 13,01*** 1,10 12,98*** 1,11 12,94*** 1,10 (the same than in previous model) Contextual-level var. Collective experiences of war trauma - weighted by common identification

1,01** 0,36 1,00** 0,30 1,05** 0,29

- weighted by ethnic similarity 0,04 ns 0,37 - - - - - weighted by territorial space - - -0,07 ns 0,29 - - - weighted by mobility space - - - - -0,23 ns 0,27 Collective experiences of social and economic deprivation - weighted by common identification

-1,25** 0,37 -1,09** 0,38 -1,09** 0,37

- weighted by ethnic similarity 0,09 ns 0,33 - - - - - weighted by territorial space - - -0,13 ns 0,36 - - - weighted by mobility space - - - - -0,14 ns 0,32 Model enhancement 0,07(2) ns 0,25(2) ns 0,89(2) ns Explained contextual variance 0,1% 0,4% 1,5%

Support for legal prosecution by type of human rights violation (i.e. by vignette)

Judicial rights Social rights Humanitarian norms

B SE B SE B SE Individual-level var. (the same than in previous model)

Contextual-level var. Collective experiences of war trauma 0,84** 0,27 0,51(*) 0,29 1,27** 0,37

Collective experiences of social and economic deprivation -1,14*** 0,26 -0,65* 0,28 -1,55*** 0,37

Model enhancement 17,99(2)*** 5,30(2) (*) 16,72(2)*** Explained contextual variance 31,7% 10,1% 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.

Final thoughts

Simplified narratives of (ethnic) ingroup victimization imply directed forgetting of (Elcheroth & Spini, forthcoming) : – 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.