How can deliberative processes address post-conflict justice at the regional level?
Many contemporary conflicts, like those in the Balkans, the Middle East or the Great Lakes, have regional dynamics. These regional conflict dynamics have not been addressed in the practice of post-conflict justice, leaving an ‘impunity gap’. Responding to this gap scholars and practitioners have called for a regional approach to post-conflict justice. But, we still lack insight about the effects of regional justice-seeking. Dr Kostovicova's paper studies a unique civil society initiative in the Balkans advocating the establishment of a regional war crimes commission (RECOM), and leverages the theory of democratic deliberation to assess the regional approach to post-conflict justice. It applies human-coded content analysis and computer-assisted text analysis to a corpus of over half a million words in six languages comprised of RECOM’s transcripts to generate evidence about the reconciliatory potential of post-conflict justice at a regional level.
Dr Denisa Kostovicova is Associate Professor in Global Politics at the European Institute, LSE. She is a scholar of post-conflict reconstruction with a particular interest in post-conflict justice processes. Dr Kostovicova regularly engages in knowledge exchange with policy makers and has recently contributed to two inquires on the Western Balkans, by the House of Lords International Relations Committee and by the House of Commons Foreign Relations Committee. She currently leads a five-year research project ‘Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding (JUSTINT)’, funded by the European Research Council.
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