ICTY Evidence On Detention Sites: An Agenda For Comparative Research

Abstract

This paper is an extension of material presented at the 18th annual meeting of the European Society of Criminology. The paper sets out an approach for some work in progress, which seeks to develop a comparative analysis of sites of detention during the Yugoslav conflicts occurring between 1991 and 2001. These were a series of conflicts occurring on the territories of current day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, and Macedonia as the post-Yugoslav political landscape was violently contested. The paper advances in four steps:

A light-touch historical review of detention and concentration of civilians;

A short outline of three different disciplinary perspectives (Bergholz 2016; Bulutgil 2016; Malešević 2017) that inform my proposed analysis of wartime detention sites in the former Yugoslavia; A summary of detention sites covered in ICTY indictments;

A proposal of multiple levels of comparison to answer a range of questions on war, detention sites and atrocity crimes.

The work builds on earlier developments, particularly on multi-level analysis of atrocity crime (Aitchison, 2014: 37-40, with a particular debt to van Baar and Huisman 2012), on the role of police in atrocity crimes in the Bosnian Krajina (Aitchison 2016), and on making use of ICTY archives as criminological data (Aydın-Aitchison, forthcoming).

Keywords: Criminology, Yugoslavia, War Crimes, ICTY, Detention, Comparative