'Seeing justice to be done': the documentaries of the ICTY and the visual politics of European value(s). Issue 1 (2nd January 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Atanasoski, Neda
• Is Part Of: Transnational cinemas. Volume 9:Issue 1(2018)
• Page Start: 68
• Page End: 85
• Publication Date: 2018-01-02
• Subjects: ICTY -- outreach programme -- educational media -- documentary film -- social sculpture -- Omarska -- postsocialism; Motion pictures -- Periodicals; Motion pictures and globalization -- Periodicals; Motion picture industry -- Periodicals; Motion picture industry; Motion pictures and globalization; Periodicals; 791.43
• DOI: 10.1080/20403526.2018.1471795
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2040-3526

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article addresses the series of seven documentaries produced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in relation to postsocialist politics and competing notions of justice. While they are considered educational media, given their circulation, these films, while not immediately legible as transnational cinema, might usefully be regarded as such because of their intended global reach and because of their visual production of a global and singular version of justice. Rather than focusing on questions of genre, this article emphasizes that as part of a transnational circuit of documentary films produced by an international tribunal, the ICTY documentaries evidence the limited liberal notion of justice (framed as universal justice) scaffolding the workings of a post-Cold War global human rights regime. The narrative and visual modes through which the films lay claims to historical truth as the foundation of future justice for the Balkans draws spatial as well as temporal boundaries, in which "terror" and illiberal values are expunged from Western Europe's past and displaced onto the post-Yugoslav nations. When analyzed as a whole, the ICTY documentaries thus sketch borders around an idea of Europe, and demarcate values and modes of violence that are ostensibly foreign to present-day Europe.