Attitudes towards non-legal factors promoting reconciliation in Bosnia: The role of transitional justice measures of acknowledgment, outgroup blame and collective victimhood

• In Event: New Developments in International Crimes and Transitional Justice

Abstract

Transitional justice (TJ) measures are often assumed to help post conflict societies to comes to terms with the past and promote reconciliation. In a divided social setting, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), TJ measures took on mostly the form of legal responses to help uncover the truth about the crimes of the past and to establish individual accountability for these. However, the focus on legal forms of justice has been criticized for establishing a selective and often contested account of the past. Criminal justice is inevitably symbolic and is considered, at best, to have a limited role in facilitating post-conflict reconciliation. For social repair to be achieved and communities to trust each other again, it is increasingly apparent that fundamental attitudinal changes need to take place. Non-legal TJ measures aiming at the mutual acknowledgment of the moral accountability and the suffering of all parties involved in the past conflict could help achieve such objectives. Through analysis of survey data collected in BiH with 855 respondents, and using structural equation modelling techniques, we demonstrate how support for non-legal measures of acknowledgment of accountability and truth can promote support for the positive role of non-legal factors in reconciliation processes. These relationships are negatively impacted by out-group blame, as well as positively impacted by acknowledgment of the victimhood of the out-group and of collective responsibility. Our findings highlight the importance of acknowledging all rights and wrongs of the past, as well as the critical need for TJ to be attuned to local realities and needs.

Author

• Mina Rauschenbach, University of Leuven