Reconciliation as a Politics of Transition in Post War Societies: Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Croatia

Abstract

The dissertation examines Reconciliation in the context of Transitional Justice (TJ), where questions about the legacies of conflict are managed rather than resolved. As an international intervention objective, reconciliation is linked with requirements for justice and governance when operationalized through neoliberal models for individual accountability and regulation. The study explores the question of reconciliation in postwar Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia under an international regime of accountability (as a form of TJ) that targeted the state, society and individuals. The dissertation focuses on local engagement and formulation of competing or complementary processes developed to manage the social outcome of war. The dissertation is based on seven years (2004-2011) of fieldwork into the actions of local NGOs in each state, dealing with the needs and grievances of victims from war in the Balkans, alongside the experiences of local practitioners and members of organizations. The thesis specifically maps international and local processes related to reconciliation over a twenty-year timeframe. The morally charged TJ paradigm often fails to consider the local interconnected experience of multiple processes when densely focused on ‘progressing’ the past as a legal project, and the societies as passive receptacles. The social consequences with experiencing war, then reform, convey a multi-layered entangling of each society in problems of the past and myopic approaches that often generate grievances rather than resolutions. Reconciliation becomes sequestered by multi-layered politics of transition, shrinking, translating, and shifting legacies in unintended ways. This dissertation reveals how people live and influence multiple processes developed to deal with suffering, exclusion, defeat, and containment of undesired legacies embodied by victims. This study has implications for our understanding of active local engagement in processes addressing the consequences of political violence; impacts of neoliberal transgovernmentality as a composite of international intervention; and reconciliation as the task of local NGOs. In accounting for such dynamics, the dissertation demonstrates how a multi-scalar study can help ground debates on reconciliation for consociationalised societies, neoliberal transnational governmentality, the practices of NGOs, and accountability, to help generate new approaches that further incorporate the struggles and experiences of citizens.