Expanding the scope of post-conflict justice

Individual, state and societal responsibility for mass atrocity

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3918327
AutoresJelena Subotić (0000-0002-8790-7363, Department of Political Science, Georgia State University, [email protected], autor de correspondencia)
Año2011
Volumen48
Número2
Páginas157-169
Fecha de publicación2011-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Peace Research (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-3433 • E-ISSN: 1460-3578
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0022343310394696
OpenAlexW2145164498
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas25
Referencias citadas19

Over the past two decades, a new international regime of individual criminal accountability has emerged as a dominant regulatory mechanism to address gross human rights violations. At the same time, states are still pursuing claims against each other for human rights abuses in international courts. These two concepts of responsibility - individual and state - are not only fundamentally at odds with one another; they also exclude the third, critical aspect of political accountability - societal responsibility for past violence. This triple accountability - of individual perpetrators who committed the crimes, of the state that hired them to implement the practices, and of society that supported or tacitly approved repressive state policies - is a complex political condition that the current transitional justice framework is ill equipped to deal with. Individualization of accountability serves the retributive purpose of justice, but it is woefully inadequate to address the collective political ideologies that made such heinous crimes possible in the first place. Domestic elites can be enthusiastic supporters of individual human rights trials - not because they want to bring about justice, but because they want to shield the state and society from complicity in past crimes. To address this paradox, this article presents a new framework of post-conflict accountability that includes individual, state, and societal responsibility for human rights violations. The framework is then applied to the case of Serbian responsibility for war crimes committed in Bosnia

Accountability · Collective responsibility · Complicity · Economic Justice · Human rights · International law · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · State responsibility · Transitional justice · War crime · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · International Law and Human Rights · Law