Post-genocidal Balkans Peace: Human Justice, Morality, Memory and Oblivion

Year 2021, Issue: 7, 89 - 112, 31.12.2021

Faruk Hadžić

Abstract

This paper critically addresses the identification of transitional, retributive and restorative justice, ICTY, and historiographical memory as the moral foundation of conflict transformation and peace-building normativeness in post-Yugoslav societies. First, the paper argues that Western Balkans’ socio-political maturity depends on the moral exactitude of legal justice and ethnopolitical collective identity mechanism within conflicting memory order. Second, it questions the significant objective between memory and oblivion. Memory is a justice contributor but could affect peace, reconciliation, social progression, and development. Given humanity’s propensity for violence, then at the very least, forgetfulness and the sacrifices it imposes may be a cause for relief rather than outrage after the most critical aspects of transitional, retributive, and restorative justice are fulfilled. The meaning and significance of self-defense against the committed genocide require solicitude for conscience and moral questioning. Third, national/ethnoreligious collective denial inducted by the politically encouraged culture of fear and ethnoreligious antagonism is critical for a liberal peace stalemate and social (in)justice. Thus, a decades-long political matrix regarding the “ethnonational interest” and ethnic patriotic collectivism departed as exceptional nationalism. Finally, these circumstances make human (universal) justice principles an open question.

Keywords

Balkans, ICTY, former Yugoslavia, Transitional, Retributive and Restorative justice, Genocide, Memory, Ethnopolitics, Peace, Morality

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