Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Evaluating Retributive Justice in Croatia

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University of Connecticut graduate student, Katharine Hawkins, with the guidance Dr. Richard A. Wilson, will undertake ethnographic research on local knowledge, perceptions, experiences, and practices after genocide and other forms of mass violence and human rights violations. The research is to be conducted in Croatia where the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is nearing the end of its mandate to investigate and prosecute violations of human rights that occurred in the early 1990s. The researcher seeks to ascertain the degree of correspondence between local ideas of justice and international legal conceptions as articulated at the ICTY. The degree of overlap between local and international justice models has implications for the applicability of international criminal proceedings and other transitional justice methods.The ground-up perspective that this researcher will employ has heretofore been largely absent from the planning of responses and theoretical debates about nation building, healing, and justice that surround past intergroup violence. The researcher will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in a Croatian village where Serb returnees and Bosnian Croat refugees share the ongoing post-conflict difficulties of housing shortages and high unemployment rates. She will live with local families and undertake vounteer service, as well as conduct semi-structured and structured or survey interviews in 200 households. The degree of empirical variation in individuals' experiences, as victims, perpetrators, or bystanders, will add depth to social scientific analysis of the post-conflict social and political context. While previous studies have focused on the ICTY's judicial procedures and domestic compliance with its jurisdiction, this research will contribute rich, local data to the debate over how to best address human rights violations by documenting the views of those people who experienced the crimes, either as perpetrators or as victims. The researcher seek to understand how decisions made at the international level become (or do not become) meaningful in daily life. The results of this study may be used to develop improved methods for providing accountability and ending cycles of violence. The research also will contribute to the education of a graduate student.