Reclaiming Justice: The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and Local Courts

For the first time in legal history, an indictment was filed against an acting head of state, Slobodan Milosevic, for crimes that Milosevic allegedly committed while he was in office. Seeking to change the concept of ethnic cleansing from a rationalizing euphemism to an incriminating metaphor, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) set precedents and expanded the boundaries of international criminal and humanitarian law. In Reclaiming Justice, Sanja Kutnjak Ivkovich and John Hagan add to prior literature about the ICTY by providing a comprehensive view of how people from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, and Serbia view and evaluate the ICTY. Kutnjak Ivkovich and Hagan ask crucial questions about international justice in a systematic and comprehensive manner, looking into the ICTY's legality and judicial independence, as well as specific issues of substantive and procedural justice and collective and individual responsibility. Kutnjak Ivkovich and Hagan provide an in-depth analysis of perceptions about the ICTY, the subsequent work of its local courts, and decisions reached by the local courts. They also examine the relationship between the views of the ICTY and ethnicity, a particularly relevant notion because the war was fought largely along ethnic lines.