International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Grassroots Mobilization for Justice: Insights From Bosnia and Herzegovina

Despite the fact that transitional justice measures have become established components of almost all modern peace-building efforts, the existing understandings of complex causal pathways that link transitional justice interventions to their supposed goal of reconciliation in deeply divided societies continue to remain largely underspecified and undertheorized. This article empirically investigates the impact of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on reconciliation in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. After a detailed process-tracing study of reconciliation in town, it proposes that ICTY has contributed to intergroup reconciliation via the mechanism of grassroots mobilization for justice.