Justice in the Wake of War

REVIEW BY GREGORY A. RAYMOND

Honors College and Department of Political Science, Boise State University

Peace with Justice? War Crimes and Accountability in the Former Yugoslavia. By Paul R.Williams and Michael P. Scharf. Landham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. 352 pp.,$75.00 cloth (ISBN 0-7425-1855-8), $26.95 paper (ISBN 0-7425-1856-6).

Throughout history, political leaders have thought strategically about whenand how to wage war. Far less deliberation has gone into crafting peace settle-ments. Yet battlefield success, no matter how impressive, does not automaticallyyield an enduring peace. The diplomatic landscape is littered with militarytriumphs that were never converted into lasting peace settlements. It is easyfor victors to slap together a peace treaty that will hold for a generation, warnedBritish Prime Minister David Lloyd George (cited in Gilbert 1966:189) at the endof World War I. What is difficult is to forge a peace that will not incite anotherround of fighting once those who have experienced the horrors of combat havepassed away.

Wars, as Lloyd George pointed out, can be concluded with agreements that eitherdampen or inflame relations between former belligerents. How the vanquished aretreated has far-reaching consequences for building a durable peace. Among policy-makers, one school of thought on postwar policies advocates punitive measures:Victors should be harsh to ensure that the enemy’s defeat is irreversible. Anotherschool calls for more lenient policies: Victors should be magnanimous to extinguishany desire for revenge by the defeated. The first approach seeks stability byeliminating an adversary’s capacity to mount a future military challenge; the secondby building trust between former adversaries (see Kegley and Raymond 2002).Although advice from the first school of thought may be seductive to practitionersof realpolitik, members of the second school caution that punitive policies spawn anacute sense of injustice on the losing side, which can undermine efforts to promotesocial healing.

Is ‘‘justice’’ the cornerstone of a durable postwar peace? Some people think so,as evidenced by the chants of ‘‘No justice, no peace!’’ that are common inpolitical demonstrations around the world. From this perspective, if injusticesare not addressed in war-torn societies after the cessation of combat, smold-ering resentments are apt to reignite a new cycle of violence. Such fearsseem particularly warranted following wars of succession in which belligerentsremain mired in a military stalemate. Yet, can justice be served in these extremecases?

According to Paul Williams and Michael Scharf, the brutal conflict emanatingfrom the dissolution of Yugoslavia during the 1990s provides a fertile domain forexamining this question because of the unprecedented effort to establish justice-based institutions as part of the peace-building process. In their insightful and well-organized book, Peace With Justice?, they set out to accomplish three main goals:(1) determine the extent to which norms of justice played a role in efforts to buildpeace within the former Yugoslavia; (2) identify the conditions that either amplifiedor constrained the impact of these efforts; and (3) ascertain how well these efforts

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were integrated with or competed with other approaches to peace buildingFsuchas accommodation, economic inducements, and the use of force.

To guide their research, Williams and Scharf adopt what they call a cognitivecontextual process framework, which posits that states are learning-capable actorswho continually propose, test, and revise peace-building policies that they believewill serve their evolving interests. The framework suggests that as states interactwithin the context of a given conflict, various patterns of practice emerge. Thepatterns generate expectations about subsequent behavior and may lead to thecreation of informal regimes and formal institutions that support the developmentof international norms. As the perceived self-identities and interests of states changeover time, new cycles of norm formation occur. In short, peace-building forWilliams and Scharf involves a continual process of competition and iterativelearning, in which rival norms compete for primacy.

The strength of Peace With Justice? lies in its application of the cognitivecontextual process framework to the Yugoslav case. Carefully sifting through awelter of primary and secondary sources, Williams and Scharf marshal compellingevidence that norms of justice did not fare well until late in the peace process.Instead, the primary strategy was accommodation, an approach that attempts tosatisfy as many of the objectives of each side in a conflict as possible. Not only werelegal norms outlawing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide initiallyexcluded from the peace-building process, but most of the peace builders were alsoslow to grasp the shortcomings of accommodation. Even when some of them recog-nized that accommodation was failing, they hesitated to replace it with a justice-based strategy, fearing that autonomous institutions would supersede states in thepeace process. Although rhetorical appeals to justice were frequent, Williams andScharf leave us with the sobering conclusion that several important individuals inthe peace-building process lacked an appreciation of the role that norms of justicecould play in individualizing guilt, delegitimizing those governmental structuresresponsible for humanitarian crimes, providing a mechanism for victim catharsis,and deterring future atrocities.

Peace With Justice? is a thought-provoking book. Still, some areas of thework warrant further development. Little attention is given to explicating howthe authors conceptualize international norms, and how empirical findings fromthe burgeoning literature on norm formation and decay relate to their research(see Raymond 1997 for a summary and review). A second area worthy offurther development is the authors’ conceptualization of justice. Ever since Socratesraised the question ‘‘What is justice?’’ in Plato’s Republic, philosophers andtheologians, novelists and playwrights, as well as journalists and social scientistshave wrestled with the meaning of the term. Williams and Scharf see justicethrough a legal lens. For them, it entails truth (accurately recording the causes,conduct, and consequences of the war), fairness (third parties behavingimpartially), rectitude (refusing to appease perpetrators of humanitarian crimes),and retribution or requital (punishing the guilty, compensating victims, and thelike). However, justice can also be viewed through other lenses. For example, RamaMani (2002) delves into issues of distributive justice in addition to exploring legalaccountability. A useful avenue for future research would be to examine theproblems of building a peace in the aftermath of war from a multidimensionalperspective that includes analyses of distributive, retributive, corrective, andrestorative justice.

In summary, Peace With Justice? makes an important contribution to the literatureon war termination and peace building. Clearly written and meticulouslydocumented, the book speaks to Balkan specialists but also to the wider scholarlycommunity interested in international reconciliation. It would be a valuableaddition to upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses on internationallaw and conflict resolution.

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References

GILBERT, MARTIN. (1966) The Roots of Appeasement. New York: Plume Books, New American Library.KEGLEY, CHARLES W. Jr., AND GREGORY A. RAYMOND. (2002) From War to Peace: Fateful Decisions in

International Politics. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press.MANI, RAMA. (2002) Beyond Retribution: Seeking Justice in the Shadows of War. Cambridge: Polity.RAYMOND, GREGORY A. (1997) Problems and Prospects in the Study of International Norms. Mershon

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