Norm contestation and reconciliation: evidence from a regional transitional justice process in the Balkans

ABSTRACT

We have limited understanding of how ethnic groups can achieve an agreement on tackling the legacy of war crimes, because transitional justice scholars have been focused primarily on challenges to post-conflict reconciliation. Addressing this gap, we investigate whether contestation over the norm of transitional justice prevents inter-ethnic reconciliation, operationalized by us as reconciliatory discourse. Empirical evidence is drawn from the study of debates conducted by a transnational advocacy network (RECOM), which proposes a regional fact-finding commission in the Balkans. Applying text analysis to identify key themes in these debates, we find reconciliatory discourse in those debates where there is norm contestation. Also, the spatial scale of a transitional justice process matters. We identify different patterns of discourse at different levels of debates. Debates containing norm contestation are associated with ethnically centred arguments at the national level, but with sustained scrutiny of proposed solutions at the regional level despite ethnic divisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Norms
• transitional justice
• reconciliation
• transnational advocacy networks
• text analysis
• Balkans

Acknowledgements

Both authors thank Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, Bill Kissane and the three reviewers for their helpful comments, as well as Ivona Ladjevac for research assistance and Aaron Glasserman for editing assistance. The article benefited from feedback and comments by participants in the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA), Atlanta, the Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association (BISA), Edinburgh, the workshop “Reimagining Conflict-Transformation” organized by the Centre for Conflict, Rule of Law and Society, Bournemouth University, and the authors’ workshop “Rethinking Reconciliation and Transitional Justice after Conflict” held at London School of Economics and Political Science.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Denisa Kostovicova http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6243-4379

Notes

1. See http://www.recom.link/sr/115677-2/page/5/.

2. Transcripts in Albanian, Macedonian and Slovenian are available in Bosnian–Croatian–Serbian.

3. By Denisa Kostovicova with some research assistance.

4. For descriptive statistics of the analysed consultations, see Table 1 and Table 3, and of the RECOM corpus, see Table 4 in the Supplementary Material.

5. See Table 2 in the Supplementary Material.

6. See Table 3 in the Supplementary Material.

7. Alceste stands for Analyse des Lexèmes Co-occurents dans les Énnoncés Simples d’un texte [Analysis of the co-occurring lexemes within the simple statements of a text].

8. Schonhardt-Bailey (2008, Appendix 1) provides a detailed account of the “Alceste methodology.”

9. The Phi coefficient allows the comparison of variables of interest in the two analysed corpora as it factors out sample size, and hence sample specificity (Vallès 2014, 129–132).

10. One ECU illustrates each class, but additional illustrations are included for key findings (the interpretative, argumentative and reconciliatory classes). See Table 5 and Table 6 in the Supplementary Material, for first ten ECUs for each class.

11. The name is anonymized for ethical reasons.

Additional information

Funding

Dr Kostovicova acknowledges gratefully the Leverhulme Trust (Research Fellowship RF-2015-262), which supported her research for this paper.