Tragic Staging as Critique in the War Crimes Tribunal

Slobodan Praljak’s dramatic suicide before the ICTY news cameras acted as a protest: against the verdict that labeled him “war criminal”; against the international legal regime generally. A theatre director-turned-general, Praljak defied the tribunal’s portrayal of “the banality of evil” by casting himself as a revolutionary tragic hero. This essay explores his critique of the ICTY, the dramatic texts that informed it, and his suicide as its culminating expression, while looking at problems facing war crimes tribunals generally: how to serve as “theaters of international justice” while renouncing theatrics; how to reconcile criminal accountability with enduring narratives of tragic fate

Criminology · International law · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Tribunal · War crime · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Psychology