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Project

Assessing, addressing and repairing the harms of state crime: bearers' and stakeholders' perceptions and processes in Kosovo

In the 1990s, serious and persistent state crime occurred in several states of the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo. With the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the European policy community for the first time established ‘justice seeking’ bodies for dealing with state crimes on its own soil. Much less has been done so far to assess and restore the harms generated by state crime. It is this gap that the proposed project is intended to fill. Using the war in Kosovo and its aftermath as a case study, the project aims:

To map bearers’ and other stakeholders’ perceptions of state crimes and the related harms, including the bearers’ and stakeholders’ assessment of the crime types and the harms severity, incidence and causes;

To review what has been done to address and restore the harms of state crime;

To map bearers’ needs and other stakeholders’ suggestions to address and restore and

To draw policy recommendations.

The project will implement a largely qualitative approach.  Data will be collected through:

An analysis of criminal proceedings and other documents,

Semi-structured interviews, including some standardized questions, and

Observations at trials.

Access to the data will be secured via my field knowledge, as a long-time member of the largest inter-ethnic initiative addressing war crimes in the region. The project will also benefit from my legal and criminological expertise, the promoter’s harm assessment experience and co-promoters’ knowledge of state crime.

Date:1 Oct 2016 →  1 Oct 2020
Keywords:state crime, state harm, restorative justice, war, transitional justice, Kosovo
Disciplines:Criminology
Project type:PhD project