International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans
Virtual Trials and the Struggle for State Cooperation

This book investigates how the UN International Criminal Court pressures states to hand over their own leaders for trial.

Victor Peskin (Author)

9780521872300, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 March 2008

296 pages
24 x 16.1 x 2.2 cm, 0.56 kg

'Victor Peskin approaches his study of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR) as a political scientist rather than as a lawyer, and as such has produced an invaluable guide to the politics of contemporary international justice. … This book fills a significant gap in the literature, and does so by telling a compelling story backed up by information gleaned from eight months of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews. Peskin has put in the graft and it shows: this is a work of narrative detail rather than a sweeping analysis of the tribunals from on high, revealing the controversies, conflict, public shaming and private negotiating that have shaped and constrained the pursuit of international justice through the tribunals.' International Affairs

Today's international war crimes tribunals lack police powers, and therefore must prod and persuade defiant states to co-operate in the arrest and prosecution of their own political and military leaders. Victor Peskin's comparative study traces the development of the capacity to build the political authority necessary to exact compliance from states implicated in war crimes and genocide in the cases of the International War Crimes Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Drawing on 300 in-depth interviews with tribunal officials, Balkan and Rwandan politicians, and Western diplomats, Peskin uncovers the politicized, protracted, and largely behind-the-scenes tribunal-state struggle over co-operation.

Part I. Introduction: 1. International war crimes tribunals and the politics of state cooperation
Part II. The Balkans: Strategies of Noncompliance and Instruments of Pressure: 2. Slobodan Milosevic and the politics of state cooperation
3. International justice and Serbia's troubled democratic transition
4. Franjo Tudman and the politics of international justice
5. The politics of state cooperation in Croatia's democratic era
Part III. Rwanda: Virtual Trials, International Justice, and the Politics of Shame: 6. The struggle to create the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
7. 'Trials of cooperation' and the battles for Karamira and Barayagwiza
8. Investigating Rwandan patriotic front atrocities and the politics of bearing witness
9. Victor's justice revisited: the prosecutor vs. Kagame
Part IV. Conclusion: 10. The present and future of international criminal justice.

Subject Areas: International humanitarian law [LBBS], Political economy [KCP], Human rights [JPVH], Comparative politics [JPB]