Abstract
War is traumatic and formative. It creates narratives that define identities of individuals, ethnicities and nations. It affects how people view the world around them. The everyday and emotional Croatian narrative of the Homeland War holds this central role in Croatian society. It reverberates across the social fabric of the nation, and it dynamically interacts with processes of transitional justice. This introductory chapter asks, what effect has the transitional justice process had on narratives related to the conflict? It presents a replicable research design to unpack why war crimes trials struggle to instil human rights narratives in the societies they target. It also outlines the context within which they operated in. The Croatian case study shows that narratives presented from the top-down by courts, domestic or international, face significant obstacles in the context of everyday narratives and that their interaction is more complex than previously thought.
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Sokolić, I. (2019). Introduction. In: International Courts and Mass Atrocity. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90841-0_1
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