Transitional Justice and the Creation of Historical Narratives in Croatia and Serbia
Transitional Justice and the Creation of Historical Narratives in Croatia and Serbia

Summary/Abstract: Fifteen years after the end of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, discourses about the present and future are based upon revised and reconstructed narratives about the past. Therefore, the relationships between transitional justice, political ideologies and historical narratives are still contested and vague. Recent history in Serbia and Croatia is determined more by each nationality’s collective emotional memory than by common factual history. This paper analyses the impact transitional justice mechanisms have on historical narratives and the creation of collective memory about the war. As the “existing empirical knowledge about the impacts of transitional justice is still limited”, its influence on local societies is measured through its impact on political ideologies and historical narratives triggered by war crime trials. So far, in Serbia and Croatia the main transitional justice tool has been the prosecution of war crimes. We argue that transitional justice, instead of triggering truth seeking and truth telling processes that would lead to reconciliation, multiplied mutually exclusive historical narratives that determined national collective identities.

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