For the Record: Expert Knowledge in War Crimes Trials

Abstract

Expert evidence about the social, political and economic context of large-scale violence is an important, though overlooked aspect of the work of the Yugoslav and Rwanda war crimes tribunals.  The anthropologists, historians, political scientists and human rights activists who have testified before these two war crimes tribunals help the prosecution and defence to establish the broad context within which large-scale atrocities have unfolded.

In my research, I am interested in social science and humanities expert evidence as revealing the work of international war crimes courts in producing official ‘knowledge’ about the causes and consequences of large scale conflict.

Expert witnesses are also interesting in highlighting the ways in which international transitional justice processes impact upon and shape the identities of communities beyond those from the conflict-affected area.

In this talk, I outline my interest in the expert witnesses from the social sciences and humanities, and in particular, I examine their expertise in relation to the work of the Tribunals in producing a ‘record’ of what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s.

About the speaker

Doris Buss is Associate Professor at the department of Law and Legal Studies of Carlton University, Ottowa.

She is visiting the Netherlands as a speaker at a seminar ‘Regional and International Discourses on Deliveries of Justice in Former Yugoslavia: Histories, Meanings and Narratives’  to be held on 23rd April 2012, at NIAS, Wassenaar.

The seminar is organized by NIAS fellowship theme group The Real and the Imagined in Contemporary Balkans. ISS Associate Professor Dubravka Zarkov is NIAS fellow (February – June 2012) and group coordinator.

Further info:

kingdon@remove-this.iss.nl