Reconciliation by stealth: How people talk about war crimes

On the 24th of May, Seesox welcomed Denisa Kostovicova (European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science) to present her new book “Reconciliation by Stealth: How People Talk About War Crimes.” Marilena Anastasopoulou (Pembroke College, Oxford) chaired the meeting. The discussants were Jessie Barton Hronešová (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Ca’ Foscari University in Venice) and John Gledhill (Oxford Department of International Development).

The new book, Kostovicova explained, is about what happens after mass atrocity. When do people start looking for justice? And is it possible to have reconciliation after conflict? Justice has traditionally been viewed as an emancipatory concept, promoting peace and reconciliation while strengthening democracy and the rule of law. It is often said that there is no peace without justice.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, scholars have observed the negative effects of transitional justice. War-time trials, truth commissions, and other such initiatives have not always brought clear benefits to society. Scholars have shown how the pursuit of transitional justice can further divide societies, antagonise groups, and slow down democratisation. Often, suspects brought before the Hague are hailed as heroes at home.

Kostovicova’s book takes a new look at the topic, asking: might there be something we are not noticing because we are looking only at the negatives? In her case study, she looks at the RECOM process in the Balkans, a civil society initiative advocating the founding of a Regional Commission for Establishing the Facts about War Crimes and other Serious Human Rights Violations in Yugoslavia from January 1991 to the end of 2001.RECOM was special in several ways: It was a regional rather than a state commission; it was multi-ethnic rather than mono-ethnic; it had grass-roots support rather than being directed top-down; and it was more interested in fact-finding than in retribution (as the terms “truth” and reconciliation had been politicised, RECOM worked on concrete issues like the naming of victims). Throughout its existence, RECOM organised over 100 consultations with 6000 civil society members from all ethnic groups at the regional, national, and local levels level since 2006. Participants were asked how to bring about reconciliation, and the initiative resulted in the adoption of the 2011 draft Statute of the Regional Commission.

Up until now, scholarly literature has mainly focussed on the failures of RECOM. Focussing on concrete, tangible outcomes, scholars have taken RECOM’s inability to establish a commission to be a sign of its failure. In so doing, they have neglected the valuable process of consultations. However, Kostovicova argues that RECOM can be construed as a success.

Before the publication of Kostovicova’s monograph, no one had systematically investigated RECOM proceedings. This is despite the fact that RECOM has transcripts of all its consultations, with around four million words of data in naturally occurring divisions. This data gives an insight into the nature of inter-ethnic discussion about war crimes and opens up the possibility of treating reconciliation as a process.

Kostovicova’s view is that one ought to look at reconciliation from a communicative action perspective. Using Habermas’ theory of communicative action and transitional justice, she says such a method of reconciliation would foreground deliberative virtues like reason, orientation towards a common good, respect, reciprocity, and so on. It thus holds the potential to reconstruct societies divided by conflict. There are also several gaps in existing literature. Scholars of other areas tend to avoid divisive subjects when discussing reconciliation and transitional justice scholars tend to approach deliberation descriptively and dyadically.

What Reconciliation by Stealth contributes is the first empirical study of deliberation of war crimes and their redress, quantifying 1000 statements to code. The study combines a rigorous application and measurement of deliberation with extensive qualitative research and fieldwork. Furthermore, it investigates multi-ethnic deliberation in a divided region.

Kostovicova highlighted multiple lessons. Firstly, the study provides evidence that inter-ethnic deliberation of war crimes and justice is feasible. Secondly, it identifies the role of ethnic identification and discourse in inter-ethnic deliberation: ethnically polarising issues increase the quality of deliberation and ethnic diversity tends to be conducive to higher deliberative quality. Thirdly, the study highlights the role of intra-ethnic divisions in the recognition of the ethnic Other; the dynamic of disagreement within groups helps to build solidarity across groups.

As for broader takeaways, Kostovicova argued that we do not know much about the value of identity-talk in post-conflict contexts. People can talk about ethnicity without it becoming a discursive weapon, which provides an agenda for deliberative inter-ethnic contact. With regards to policy, deliberative problem-solving has the potential to promote transitional justice and peace.

In her commentary, Barton Hronešová highlighted Kostovicova’s contributions and raised several questions. She praised the book’s timeliness, impressive disciplinary breadth, meticulous research, and innovative conceptual anchoring. She raised the book’s methodology as a particular strength thanks to its combining of interviews and focus groups with quantitative coding. She also noted that the book illustrates the helpfulness of respectful discussion, which has wider implications outside of war crime settings. The in-person climate of RECOM discussions tends to further empathy in a way that modern online spaces cannot replicate.

Barton Hronešová asked about the role of silence and whether there were some terms that participants tended to avoid. She also asked whether it was possible to scale up the success of RECOM. Kostovicova responded that it would be difficult to make judgements about silences in the materials she investigated, but that she did gain insights into various patterns of interaction, for example with reference to gender, victimhood, and social group membership. These observations have wider implications for how different participants should be engaged.

Gledhill also began by highlighting several strengths of Kostovicova’s book. He said the monograph asked well-constructed, clear, and ambitious questions. Furthermore, he praised its empirical contribution to a theory-oriented area. Finally, he underscored Kostovicova’s sophisticated but transparently explained methods, all of which help to answer different parts of the study.

Gledhill raised the possibility that debate in a RECOM-like setting could, counterintuitively, provide another path towards reconciliation by building a certain kind of empathy. Similarly to Barton Hronešová, Gledhill asked whether the success of RECOM diffused into society more broadly and if this had implications for scaling up the project. Kostovicova answered that the mechanics of diffusion have not been researched enough. It is true that some vertical diffusion might happen when secondary elites like journalists are involved in similar projects. However, there is also horizontal diffusion that takes place when participants in the project tell their friends and neighbours about their experiences.

Ladislav Charouz (Research Assistant)