Iva Vukušić

We live in an age of notoriously short attention spans.Information overload, which as quickly as it appears, is eclipsed by another round of spamming, influences scholarly production too, making it difficult to pause and contemplate.Consider the Yugoslav wars which attracted scholarly attention while the guns were still blazing.In the 1990s, influential books by Susan Woodward, Robert Hayden, Sabrina Ramet, James Gow and others, and the perhaps even more influential BBC documentary Death of Yugoslavia (1995) created an initial framing for understanding of the conflict.Since then, much more material has become available, generated by the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).This allowed exclusive access to eyewitness testimonies and documents which would otherwise have remained state secrets forever.One might think that such a rich resource would be thoroughly utilized, leading to new findings and bold interpretations, but that has for the most part not been the case.There are several reasons for this.International interest in the Balkans peaked in the 1990s, but quickly plummeted in the current century.Gone are the days of teamwork and ambitious projects, such as the Scholars' Initiative of Charles Ingrao and Thomas Emmert and, at the same time, the academic communities in the successor states of Yugoslavia have been both chronically underfunded and focused on their own audience.This disconnect coincided exactly with the climax of the documentary avalanche.In the trial of Slobodan Milošević, who was one of 161 war criminals indicted by the ICTY, over 1250 exhibits were tendered.The transcript of the trial alone amounts to 46,639 pages, which contain the testimonies of nearly 400 witnesses.Given that the entire ICTY trial transcript runs to 2.5 million of pages, and that there are over 100,000 publicly available documents on the Tribunal's judicial database, it becomes apparent that extraordinary effort is required to open that particular can of worms.It is no coincidence that recent important contributions have come from scholars who testified at the Tribunal, such as Robert Donia and Christian Axboe Nielsen, or from those who, like Kosta Nikolić, thoroughly utilized the material it provided.Yet it would take a village to digest the full documentary legacy of the ICTY, let alone to combine it with other available sources

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