• What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The project “Accounting for genocide: legal and scientific accounting practices in the wake of the Srebrenica genocide” considered, from a social science perspective, efforts of forensic scientists, human rights workers and legal practitioners to determine how many persons were killed in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. In that respect, the project was concerned with the practices of counting missing persons, exhumed bodies and forensically identified victims and how that evidence was transformed in proof beyond reasonable doubt supporting the claim that the massacre of Srebrenica constituted a genocide. One of the problems thus being addressed is the theoretical challenge of representing absence, because how can one generate knowledge about something that is not there. In other words, the project was concerned with the question how forensic and other knowledges regarding the number of victims was rendered, and how those knowledges came to play an important role in memorializing and commemorating the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.
• Why is it important for society?
The project empirically considered two sociomaterial practices of accounting for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. First, it scrutinized efforts of national and international organizations to (ac)count how many Bosniak men were massacred and who was killed in July 1995. The second question about accounting analysed how those politically responsible at the time of the genocide were legally tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The first practice of accounting is based on inter alia forensic science, statistics, missing persons lists and witnesses conveniently subsumed under ‘atrocity victim identification’ (AVI). The second practice is the domain of adversarial legal proceedings, developing international criminal law, transitional justice and controversies over the Srebrenica genocide and legitimacy of the ICTY. The rigorous qualitative analysis focused on the various locations—mass-graves, family assistance centres, forensic laboratories, the ICTY, public domain—where objects like remains, missing persons, identities, crimes, DNA evidence, and legal cases come to matter provided a deep understanding of the question of how both practices of accounting become entangled and co-construct each other. This is important because it adds to our understanding how counting and accounting help to establish each other.
• What are the overall objectives?
The Accounting for genocide project pursued empirical, theoretical and social objectives. The empirical objective was to study (1) how AVI practices facilitated (ac)counting for how many Bosniaks were killed and who was killed exactly during the Srebrenica genocide; analyze (2) how DNA evidence contributed to holding those politically in charge at the time of the genocide legally accountable; and the project scrutinized (3) how next of kin became implicated in AVI and legal accounting practices. The theoretical objectives were to provide new perspectives on post-genocidal accounting mechanisms by (1) articulating the subjectivities (e.g. kinship, family, victims, truth) it produced, how (2) those accounting mechanisms were facilitated and build-upon previously established categories or materialities (e.g. legal argumentation, case law, mundane ways of knowing), and (3) what it governed and produced (e.g. identification, evidence, international criminal law, transitional justice, commemoration). As such, the project adds new interdisciplinary perspectives to scholarly debates in ‘science and technology studies’ (STS), ‘social and legal studies’ (SLS), international criminal law, transitional justice studies and family and kinship studies. The social objectives were to gain (1) a better understanding of how accounting mechanisms contribute to authoritative and legal record making in post-atrocity contexts deemed essential for processes of transitional justice and to gain (2) a better social scientific understanding of (DNA) identification efforts following mass fatalities like atrocity and disaster, especially with regard to experiences of surviving family members in DVI and AVI practices.
