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ABSTRACT
This article addresses the series of seven documentaries produced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in relation to postsocialist politics and competing notions of justice. While they are considered educational media, given their circulation, these films, while not immediately legible as transnational cinema, might usefully be regarded as such because of their intended global reach and because of their visual production of a global and singular version of justice. Rather than focusing on questions of genre, this article emphasizes that as part of a transnational circuit of documentary films produced by an international tribunal, the ICTY documentaries evidence the limited liberal notion of justice (framed as universal justice) scaffolding the workings of a post-Cold War global human rights regime. The narrative and visual modes through which the films lay claims to historical truth as the foundation of future justice for the Balkans draws spatial as well as temporal boundaries, in which “terror” and illiberal values are expunged from Western Europe’s past and displaced onto the post-Yugoslav nations. When analyzed as a whole, the ICTY documentaries thus sketch borders around an idea of Europe, and demarcate values and modes of violence that are ostensibly foreign to present-day Europe.
Notes
1. There are a number of aspects of this project, including the reclamation of the London Olympics’ AcerolMittal Orbit as a memorial in exile by the collective in response to Mittal steel’s refusal to allow a memorial on site, or even to let families and survivors visit the site, except on important anniversaries http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/05/17/the-dark-side-of-the-olympics-orbit/