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Virtual Roundtable on “Mapping Race, Memory, Protest and the State in Contemporary US Politics”

The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020 was yet another tragic example of the death of a black man at the hands of white police officers. Although previous killings sparked outbursts of anger, rioting, and initiatives such as Black Lives Matter, Floyd’s death has set off protests across the country and internationally. These protests again demonstrate the widespread sense of injustice and continued legacy of racial inequality in the United States, even as the Trump administration seeks to portray only violence and looting while threatening even more repressive measures. This round table brings together scholars and journalists from a variety of disciplines who have worked in both the United States and Croatia to comment on the current events and explain the causes of the current wave of unrest engulfing the country.

Click on images for YouTube recording of the session.

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New book by Summer School scholars

Check out the latest publication by several of our Summer School scholars:

This edited volume was inspired by lectures, discussions and workshops held over the past few years on the island of Cres and helps to critically re-conceptualize the way we perceive and interpret the field of transitional justice based on new, innovative case studies.

Since the 1980s, transitional justice mechanisms have been increasingly applied to account for mass atrocities and grave human rights violations throughout the world. Over time, post-conflict justice practices have expanded across continents and state borders and have fueled the creation of new ideas that go beyond traditional notions of amnesty, retribution, and reconciliation. Gathering work from contributors in international law, political science, sociology, and history, New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice addresses issues of space and time in transitional justice studies. It explains new trends in responses to post-conflict and post-authoritarian nations and offers original empirical research to help define the field for the future.

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Lecturer, Christian Axboe Nielsen, testifies as expert witness at the ICTY

Dr. Christian Axboe Nielsen, History Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark and a regular contributor to the Cres Summer School, testified as expert witness at the ICTY.

In a social media post, he captures his experience: “I do not as a rule post or comment about my appearances as an expert witness, but I will permit myself this exception. Yesterday, over 15 years after first starting as an analyst at the ICTY, I finished my fifth and, I believe, final appearance as an expert witness at the ICTY/MICT. Five cases: Krajišnik, Stanišić/Župljanin, Karadžić, Hadžić, Stanišić/Simatović. It has been an incredible journey from a young college student in St. Louis who in 1991 had only heard of a country called Yugoslavia to a historian specializing in Balkan history called as an expert witness to assist trial chambers, prosecutors and defence counsel in understanding how various ministries of internal affairs operated in the 1990s. Yesterday, after 6 days – 21 hours – of direct and cross-examination, and only a day after the Mladić judgement, I answered my final question in court at the ICTY/MICT. It was my most demanding appearance to date, both professionally and emotionally. I do not know what the rest of my life will bring, but I do know this: I would not trade this experience for anything else in the world. And however strenuous and mentally challenging my testimonies have been, they pale in comparison to the arduous experiences of the true heroes of the ICTY/MICT, the thousands of victims who have made the journey to The Hague in order to bear witness about the crimes they, their loved ones and their communities endured. I cannot even begin to imagine the pain, the grief and the other challenges they face when they come to testify. They have my eternal admiration and respect. As for me, to quote Ilija Čvorović, “Mene ako se sete na Dan Bezbednosti sete se, ako se ne sete nikom ništa, to je bila moja dužnost da radim.” Peace to all.”

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Unger Foundation awards three scholarships to Croatian Summer School participants

The Unger Foundation generously provided three scholarships for summer school participants from Croatia. Their support helps young, Croatian leaders to build common values and help expand a network of knowledge, expertise and collaboration with peers across the region and beyond.

2016 Unger Scholarship recipients from left to right: Tea Jambresic, Bruno Vignjevic and Nela Erdeljac.
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Salvadoran Court Overturns Wartime Amnesty, Paving Way for Prosecutions

The New York Times published an article on transitional justice in Latin America.

“In a ruling that clears the way for El Salvador to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes committed during its brutal civil war, the country’s highest court has struck down an amnesty law that has protected soldiers, rebel fighters and death squads for more than two decades.” [Read article]

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Guerrilla combatants in Perquín, El Salvador in 1990.

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Autocrats, the Arab Spring and the Impact of Transitional Justice

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Egyptian Protestors on 8 February 2011. Credit: Ramy Raoof.

Political changes unleashed by the 2011 Arab Spring plunged the Middle East and North Africa into political turmoil resulting in domestic and international power realignments. These developments have witnessed the outbreak of armed conflict in Libya, Syria and Yemen, a failed transition in Egypt, and the violent suppression of popular protests in the Gulf. Yet, at the same time, Tunisia, has managed to successfully negotiate its transitional process. In his engaging lecture, one of the co-founders, Dr. Chris Lamont sought to answer the following questions: What explains these divergent outcomes? What role did transitional justice polices play in acting as a catalyst for success or failure? Drawing from his extensive fieldwork experience in many of these case studies, he discussed different context-specific transitional justice mechanisms. The tools to deal with post-conflict and post-authoritarian injustice have become increasingly professionalized, including criminal trials, truth commissions and practices of memorialization, among others. According to him, however, “at the same time, there remains little understanding of the impact of these measures upon transitional processes.” Current scholarship in the field ought to further explore these boundaries. One of the Summer School’s main objective consists  therefore of innovative and interactive research presentations, engaging students and lecturers.

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Youth Movements, Alternative Spaces & Dealing with the Past

Graffiti near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt.
Graffiti near Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt.

Transitional justice has long grappled with the challenges of traditional post-conflict and post-authoritarian mechanisms, such as war crimes trials or truth commissions. However, the role of youth in this processes is less clear. In his lecture, Dr. Arnaud Kurze, one of the school’s organizers, explored the creation of alternative transitional justice spaces in post-conflict contexts, particularly concentrating on the role of art and the impact of social movements to address human rights abuses. Drawing on the former Yugoslavia, post-Mubarak Egypt and post-authoritarian Tunisia, he scrutinizes the work of contemporary youth activists and artists to deal with the past and foster sociopolitical change. His research has taken him across the former Yugoslavia, Egypt and Tunisia, interviewing youth leaders and focusing on their performance-based campaigns. Drawing from different case studies and context, he argues that this performance activism has fueled the creation of a new spatiality of deliberation—so called strategic confrontation spaces—to contest the culture of impunity and challenge the politics of memory in post-authoritarian and post-conflict contexts. He recently published an article with the Oxford International Journal of Transitional Justice called “#WarCrimes #PostConflictJustice #Balkans: Youth, Performance Activism and the Politics of Memory”

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Award-Winning Film Director Joshua Oppenheimer at Summer School

Against the backdrop of efforts to deal with the past in Southeast Asia, the summer school organized film screenings of two documentaries,The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. These films depict the situation in Indonesia, where the Sukarno regime killed and tortured hundreds of thousands of civilians accusing them of being political dissidents conspiring with communists during the 1960s. US filmmaker, Joshua Oppenheimer, rose public awareness about these atrocities through these two excellent, eye-opening documentaries. The summer school organizers invited the director and he spoke to the students about the challenges producing the footage as well as the current situation in the country and the difficult process that Indonesian society is still facing to confront this dark chapter in history.

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Joshua Oppenheimer talking to students at the summer school.

 

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Accountability in the Eye of International Actors

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Dr. Mietek Boduszynski during a lecture.

Several high-caliber practitioners lectured on international justice as part of the program, including former US diplomat, Mietek Boduszynski, one of the school’s organizers, and Christian Axboe Nielsen, a former expert witness at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). One of the questions that was addressed during these sessions pertained to the sanction power of war crimes tribunals. In this context, Dr. Boduszynski explained that “International courts need friends. This is because they lack the independent enforcement authority needed to carry out their mission, which includes apprehending wanted war criminals.” Powerful actors in the international system are potential friends, but as states they also have other interests. Therein lies one reason that diplomacy and politics and diplomacy become important variables in the study of international criminal justice. Just look at the case of the ICC’s intervention in Libya! In addition, Iraq illustrates how transitional justice, if poorly implemented, can hurt the prospects for reconciliation and peace. The trial of Saddam Hussein and the process of de-Baathification were widely seen by Iraq’s Sunnis as acts of vengeance designed to marginalize them as a minority in the new Iraq. These feelings of marginalization among Iraq’s Sunnis no doubt contributed to the conditions which allowed the Islamic State to take root in Sunni areas of Iraq in 2014.

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Summer School Kickoff

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2016 Cres Summer School cohort.

The 2016 Cres Summer School on Transitional Justice and the Politics of Memory was kicked off by the city’s Vice Mayor, Jadranka Blatt, the Frane Petrić School Principal, Josip Pope and the program’s organizers, welcoming almost two dozens of international students hailing from across Europe, the United States and Eastern Europe. The Summer School’s themes are timely and crucial, echoing many of the current political issues in today’s world, including the political reshuffling in Croatia with upcoming elections later this fall and a relentless stream of migrants who flee violence and destruction in their home countries, such as Syria and Iraq. For almost two weeks, the Summer School will offer participants an opportunity to address and discuss themes ranging from human rights, war crimes trials, cultural memory and social movements, against the backdrop of contemporary case studies and high-caliber international scholars, practitioners and experts. In its fourth year, the Summer School is off to a great start providing an enriching educational experience in a conducive learning environment.