War crimes talk: does it help or hinder peace?
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Well, well, good evening. Welcome to the LSE and welcome to this very special inaugural lecture. My name is Simon Glendinning and I'm head of the European Institute and professor of European philosophy. Inaugural lectures are...

of course always special moments in an academic's career, marking as it does their promotion to professor. Many roads will lead to such a place, some perhaps more unusual than others. I think our speaker tonight has quite an unusual road. In my own case, only friends with a very lively imagination would have seen it in my future when I was young.

On the other hand, something in my personal history may have made it seem a predictable path in my case because my dad was a university professor, a professor of Spanish. Now in preparation for my own inaugural lecture many years ago, I dug out his and it was delivered, I discovered, exactly a month before I was born.

And my mother was there, so was I. But it was a striking irony that he ended his inaugural lecture with a very pointed call. He called for the abolition of inaugural lectures. Oh my, it was more ironic still when a London newspaper reported that my own inaugural lecture was going to propose the same thing. Well, no, that was fake news.

I contradicted my dear dad. Inaugural lectures are, I argued in mine, a wonderful opportunity for a newly promoted professor to publicly profess something, to profess their commitment to selecting and discussing subjects suitable for free and open inquiry and debate in a university.

and as public occasions like this suggest, beyond the university too. So I was very happy on that occasion to have contradicted my doubt. I'm very happy too that the LSE has now recommitted itself to holding these very special occasions. And of course I'm absolutely delighted to be chairing this inaugural lecture tonight, pleased too to see so many of you here and joining us online too.

Tonight we're here to celebrate the promotion of my esteemed colleague, Denisa Kostovtcheva. So let us begin as we should. Denisa Kostovtcheva is Professor of Global Politics in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In her lecture this evening, Denisa will discuss how former opponents in war engage with the legacy of mass atrocity when the violence is over.

War crimes need to be addressed if peace is to be built. But in divided societies polarised by violence, merely talking about war crimes can deepen the divisions. How then can they be addressed at all? Drawing on her own studies of post-conflict peace building in the Balkans, Professor Kostovicheva will present lessons for contemporary conflicts.

The event tonight, by the way, will be recorded and it's hoped that a podcast of the event will be made available online. And as usual, there'll be a chance for you too to put your questions to our speaker at the end. More exceptionally, on an occasion such as this, there will be a drinks reception outside after the event to which you are all welcome.

Less exceptionally, please now make sure that your phones are turned to silent. However, before handing over to Denisa, I'm very pleased to invite William Wallace.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire, to give some introductory remarks. Lord Wallace is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at LSE. He was visiting professor at the Central European University from 1993 to 1996 and was the first chair of its International Relations Department. He was the Lord's Minister in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in the coalition government of 2010 to 15.

William's going to say some words of his own, then we go to Denisa. William, it is over to you. One of the pleasures of becoming a retired academic comes from following your former students as they develop their own careers in the academic world or elsewhere. So I'm very proud to introduce Denisa Kostovakova, whom I taught over 30 years ago as a full professor at the LSE, where I used also to work. I call an argument

in about 1988 about Balkans, when I was director of studies at Chatham House with Christopher Zvietsch. I tried to persuade him that he should write a policy paper on the politics of the Balkans. And he said, "No one is ever going to be interested in the Balkans, William." Nevertheless, he did write it, and sadly, by the time it came out,

It became one of the best-selling policy papers we had produced for some years because Yugoslav conflict was breaking out and all of a sudden people wanted to know. And they still need to know and want to know, sadly, and the politics of the Balkans is clearly something that we all will continue to need to understand. Some years later, Otto Pick and Ernest Gellner

well-known and distinguished graduates and teachers at the LSE asked me to come and help set up a new department at the Central European University. And in one of the first lectures that I gave there in 1994,

a very serious and sober young woman came up to discuss the conflict then raging across the former Yugoslavia. She'd been a journalist in the early stages of the conflict and I still recall vividly what she said to me. When you walk down a village street and see bodies of people your own age on either side, it does something to you. Just as I recall walking into the student common room,

and finding two fellow students, one Serb, the other Croat, smoking and sharing an ashtray and crying into it. Teaching about war and peace, international order and disorder in these circumstances did something to me too. It made me understand the challenges of being a social scientist, of seeking to be dispassionate about passionate issues.

The study of international politics and related research on conflict and conflict resolution in fragile societies forces us to confront violence and hatred, sometimes at personal risk. Thankfully, Denise, you never pushed me into any dangerous circumstances. I was just remarking on Georgi Brinitsa, who some years later did invite me to Georgia.

where after a while I found myself in a convoy surrounded by little wee men with heavy weapons. Not a pleasant academic experience. International relations, as a Foreign Office Planner once told the British International Studies Association, is not an innocent profession. Denise, I've watched you manage these tensions

as you became a scholar working on conflicts and reconciliation, divided societies and war crimes, being in your turn dispassionate about all of these passionate issues. And I still recognise the serious and sober woman that I first met, though now a mature scholar. And I'm very proud to be able to say that I made a small and early contribution to your impressive career.

And I hope that by now, some of your own students, in their turn, are beginning to make impressive contributions of their own. Thank you.

Thank you so much for your introductions and I very much hope that this lecture really lives up to the words, kind words that you said about me and about my work. So in this lecture I will examine how we as scholars can contribute to the recovery of societies that have experienced mass atrocity crimes.

and to explore and think about how individuals, states and societies address war legacies entails thinking about the nature of peace. And we know that there are different kinds of peace and different ways of evaluating peace. Alongside death and human suffering, wars leave enormous political, economic and cultural devastation

as we can currently see is happening in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, just to mention a few places. So peace has to be built along all these dimensions: economic, political, cultural. And I worked a fair bit on the political economy side of things and looked at, for example, state capacity. There is a lot to learn about peace if you just look at state capacity.

But in tonight's lecture, what I would like to do is I would like to talk about something that we call, that I call ethical peace. Ethical peace is a kind of peace where the loss and suffering of the victims has been acknowledged and compensated symbolically or materially, and where perpetrators have been held accountable for their crimes. So the question then is, how does war crimes talk help or hinder peace?

So when I talk about ethical peace, I have in mind some of the participants in my research. For example, I think of a mother who told me that when she goes to church, she doesn't know whether to light a candle for a living soul or a dead person, thinking of her missing son and hoping that he is dead.

I also think of a teacher who escaped an attack on his village, but his two brothers and an uncle didn't. And when he went to the mass grave to find their bodies, all he could find was a pile of shoes. And the reason is because the perpetrators

wanting to escape accountability, moved their bodily remains hundreds of miles away into secondary, or what we call tertiary, graves as well. I also think of a genocide survivor who had both fortune and misfortune to survive. Fortunate because he lived, but cursed to have to live with the fact that all male members of his family had been brutally killed.

And when I engaged with these people who experience such pain and suffering, and war has been over in the Balkans for over 30 years, what is striking is that their reality seems a little bit better than the reality of war, if

In today's Balkans, decades after the end of hostilities, many victims feel robbed of justice, dignity, and even of their individual identity. And as the mother of the missing son told me, the victims are humiliated and so are the families humiliated as well. This is because public discourse about war crimes often demeans the victims and divides communities.

So, to understand how this occurred, we need to look at political communication. We need to be aware that even the establishment of legal and forensic facts, for example in war crimes trials, doesn't automatically produce the outcomes we expect of justice processes such as recognition of victims and the acceptance of responsibility. So how can we explain that?

So first we need to look at inter-group dynamics and we have to look at what happens with identity. In conflicts that involve different groups, victims are not seen as individuals but exclusively through the lens of the identity group they belong to or they're seen as an enemy group. In other words, collective identity trumps individual identity.

And this process starts before the violence and it gets retrenched and persists during the violence and persists after the conflict is over. So, for example, we can observe this logic in the present conflict in Gaza, where in the statements of many Israeli officials and commentators, when asked to justify the disproportionate violence against Palestinian civilians,

Individual personal tragedies are lost and they're seen as a collectivity, often identified with Hamas. And we've seen this way too often in the Balkans. And secondly, at this intergroup level, we observe what we call ethnocentrism of death and victim Olympics.

Ethnocentrism of death means that after the war, the groups are focused exclusively on the suffering of their own victims. So that entails often the ignoring at best or denial of the crimes of the others. And we see victim Olympics in which groups compete in terms of who has suffered more. However,

In parallel, there are processes that are going on within the groups. So, as in any conflict, we observe within the groups what we call a pyramid of harm. The scope of harm in terms of number of people affected by violence is immense and the range of harms is vast.

So inevitably, some harms will receive more attention than others. So for example, if we look at what's happening in Ukraine at the moment, even before the war is over, we know about tragedies of Bucha, of Mariupol, about the attacks on Kramotork station, but these atrocities, they overshadow less known toponyms and other crimes.

And what follows is, after the war, is that some harms will be given greater priority and there will be internal, within group inequalities where some victims will feel that their suffering has not been recognized.

And lastly, victimhood is a political currency, but it's a political currency cashed in by political elites. We've seen in post-conflict countries on anniversaries of atrocities, politicians do grandstands, bring the victims,

talk about them, but you know when cameras are removed they do very little to put in place policies and processes that can provide adequate redress to the victims. And the politicians have been very quick to seize on these opportunities to politicize justice. We can see here on the slide

Slobodan Milošević, the Serb nationalist leader who plunged the region of former Yugoslavia into a series of conflicts through the 1990s, when he eventually ended up in the dock, he was wearing the tie with the colors of the Serbian flag

and sending a message saying that it's not me, it's actually the whole Serbian nation that is on trial. And I remember I was in Kosovo in early 2000s doing some additional research on my first book, waiting, sort of wasting the time really between some interviews,

And there was a television and the television had a live broadcast of the trial and I remember a group of men arriving to the cafe. They looked at the television and they said, "Oh, we will all end up like him one day." And that really illustrates how this projection of the collective responsibility was very, very effective.

What Milosevic did was to hide his individual responsibility behind a sense of the collective responsibility, him pretending the whole group is guilty. So no wonder then that most Serbs reject the International Criminal Tribunal as an anti-Serb court. And as you can see here,

in one of the opinion polls, 40% of people who were polled thought that the court was created to put the blame on the Serbs and only 7% to establish individual responsibility, what we actually think the International Criminal Justice should do.

In a recent survey that I conducted with my colleagues within the big research project funded by the European Research Council, we found that still to this day the groups find it very difficult to admit responsibility that members of their ethnic group have committed and this applies across all ethnic groups in the Balkans. So our

field of research that we call transitional justice, there are lots of people working on these issues of why transitional justice divides and why we have the persistence of these nationalist narratives. So how have I intervened in these scholarships? Firstly, I have engaged with civil society and ordinary people as political actors.

and by doing so my research has gone against the grain of the existing scholarship. Political scientists and international relations scholars share fascination with political power understood narrowly as the power of political elites and institutions, whether domestic or international.

People become of interest when they make themselves visible, when they take to the streets, as we have seen is happening currently in Turkey, in Serbia, and in Hungary.

And similarly, much of what we know about transitional justice and especially about political communication is from studying of what politicians say. And much less, we have a very limited understanding of what happens in the communication below that political level. And secondly, my research has taken discourse seriously.

In other words, I have been motivated to fill in this major gap in the scholarship to study discourse and language systematically as a basis of robust evidence for the claims that are being made.

If we look at the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, for example, from Rwanda, and if we go further back into history and look at the Holocaust, we know that people before they were killed by bullets, they were killed by words. In other words, political communication leads to dehumanization of others, whether they may be ethnically, religiously, or racially different.

And therefore, I think the route to re-humanizing the individual goes through political communications and this is why we need to understand better how this happened. My first scholarly experience with this question came through my PhD research when I studied the conflict in Kosovo.

What was quite interesting there is that while the wars were raging in Bosnia and Croatia, in other words in the neighborhood, Kosovo was a bit of an outlier. It was at peace, but it was a very tricky peace. Serbs, who were a minority population, have revolted, abolished Kosovo's autonomy.

And the part of this abolishment of the autonomy was the expulsion of Albanians from all institutions in the state. So basically they were expelled, over a million people were expelled from schools, doctor surgeries, news media, companies, literally everywhere.

Albanians mounted a non-violent response. They organized the entire parallel, what they call a parallel state, in private houses and people's homes. I studied the education, what happened with schooling,

And here you can see the images of children studying in a private house in a traditional Albanian living room that was donated by people, so that became a school. And here is a suburb in Pristina, the capital, which was turned, obviously several houses had to act as a school and university. Ultimately, towards

after nearly a decade of this non-violent resistance, the system started creaking because of lack of international attention to resolving the conflict. Armed resistance was mounted and basically while I was doing my field work, the war was closing in on the capital. Today, after the conflict, over two decades,

the country is still very much segregated, the independence that Albanians declared is still contested, and the victims on both sides are dissatisfied. So if there is one lesson that we can take from Kosovo, and that is that segregation and the lack of intergroup communication is no foundation for peace.

What we need to understand is how can antagonists engage with each other? Can they do it respectfully? And can they do it by showing empathy and understanding towards the suffering the same way as they would show towards the suffering of people from their own group?

And the second related question has to do with how do we know. In other words, the answer requires serious consideration of evidence to be derived systematically by systematically studying the patterns of discourse in this intergroup communication.

So I've done that by studying an initiative, a unique multi-ethnic initiative in the Balkans which gathered people from the entire region and from different ethnic groups. It was a civil society initiative whose aim was to establish the record of all war crimes in the region.

Just the mere fact of establishing a record is important because by documenting what happened to each person, it would be a form of recognition of what happened to them on one hand.

But on the other hand, it would also, by creating for the first time in the history of Yugoslavia, the record of war debt, prevent people sort of manipulating and inflating the numbers of the debt, which was the case with the numbers of the Second World War before the outbreak of the conflict in the 1990s.

It gathered about 6,000 people, as I said, from all ethnic groups: victims, teachers, journalists, human rights activists, lawyers. And they held a unique methodology in that they organized consultations. They went through villages, towns, cities and met at different levels and discussed what to do

and in the process adopted the statute of what this regional commission should look like and what it should do. While they were doing this, they recorded all their discussions. They made them available on the website and anyone can find them and has been able to find them for a long time. And it's a

a corpus of texts of about four million words. And for a political scientist, these transcripts of these discussions are an absolute treasure. And the reason why they're an absolute treasure is because they give us a corpus of what we call naturally occurring conversations.

Political scientists go into great lengths to organize, for example, experiments or to organize focus groups to mimic what these naturally occurring conversations would look like. But to have them there and on paper and just available was absolutely, I would say, amazing. And I really wanted to study them for the patterns to understand what was happening.

And I started this initiative not just because it was, you know, the data was available, so therefore let's go and study it, but also I was quite dissatisfied

with what other scholars were doing with these transcripts. They were all overwhelmed by the volume of the data and they would take out a few sentences here and there and I felt having attended these meetings that in many ways they almost misrepresented, if not just misunderstood what has happened. So what I set out was to study the quality of deliberation

deliberation as a specific type of communication which often gets confused in ordinary language for debates, for example. But deliberation is a type of communication which puts a lot of demand on the speakers.

To call communication deliberation, we would expect to see speakers fulfilling some what we call deliberative values. We would expect speakers to provide arguments,

to be respectful towards their interlocutors, to take account of what interlocutors say, to show some reciprocity, to be civil even when they express disagreement, etc. So what I've done, and my family knows, of sitting, fortunately I was given a grant to do that, for eight months,

reading these transcripts and coding, just coding for eight months, coding, reading each statement and coding according to the nine values, deliberative values, which created an amazing data set that provided unique insights in what happens when people sit together and talk about, discuss war crimes.

Many people that I interviewed alongside of doing this quantitative side of the analysis were telling me that before they sat at the table and saw a member, somebody belonging to another ethnic group, they saw them across the barrel of a gun. So therefore, when you introduce a topic

that is so divisive as war crimes, there was no guarantee which way the conversation would go. And in fact, the existing scholarship that I was reading and consulting prior to the study that I conducted, for example, scholars looking at Colombia or scholars looking at Northern Ireland were saying, "You cannot introduce

divisive issues into multi-ethnic discussions in post-conflict societies because this will lead to mutual recrimination. I was interested to see if it happens, where will it happen? Will it happen at the regional level? There was something to be found out in any case, but the results were quite striking.

they showed that actually there was no mutual recrimination as such because, you know, obviously the discussion sort of ebbed and flowed, but if you look at the large patterns you could say and compare to other places and conclude that it is possible to have interethnic deliberations about most divisive issues.

But there was a set of findings that I found were particularly important and, if you like, counterintuitive. Ethnically polarizing issues were associated with the rise, the increase in the liberation polity. Also, the liberation in the groups which were ethnically mixed

was higher than in the groups where everybody was from the same group, in the mono-ethnic groups.

And this is a very robust finding because it matches some other similar methodologies. But what my research has shown is that it was quite interesting that the deliberation quality was the highest when there were people there from the entire region.

which basically tells us that when people are confronted with difference ethnic difference or racial difference they begin to to think twice what they say whereas when they're you know just within their group the liberation quality goes down and lastly whenever people

discussed, sort of brought some sense of ethnic identity into the conversation, the liberation quality also went up. Again, this, if you like, disproved some of the thinking on the liberation in divided societies, which says that

especially when you talk about war legacies, that people need to talk about issues in human rights terms, in universal terms. You cannot bring the thing that divides. But actually what this shows is that not only that this increases the liberation quality, but you actually cannot

erase and ignore the basis on which people were harmed. So if people were harmed because they are Muslim or Serb or Albanian or Macedonian or whatever group you would like to mention from the Balkans, you cannot simply forget that when you discuss what happened.

So I have therefore provided evidence that it is possible to have empathetic solidarity in intergroup deliberation that leads to some form of reconciliation.

And I've called it reconciliation by stealth because you can easily overlook it if you don't measure it, if you don't look at those systematic patterns, and also if you only focus on what elites have to say. But of course, when we look at

how these conversations and discussion happen, we can see that ethnicity may not necessarily be an obstacle. We have to be also very careful about other, and what we call intersectional dimensions, such as, for example, gender. And this has led to my interest into how women talk.

And especially I've been interested in how women talk in mixed sex settings. In other words, how do they talk when they're in a group with men? And usually when we talk about politics and when we talk about peace and conflict processes, they're in a group of men where they're greatly outnumbered by men. So we know that women are

grossly underrepresented in peace and justice processes. According to UN, for example, in 2023, women made up only 9.6% of negotiators in these processes.

I was watching the news yesterday and the discussions about what to do about the ceasefire in Ukraine. And if you look what's happening, it's a very male affair. There is no woman in sight there. And the problem with women being a minority in this context is that women's issues are marginalized.

women experience conflicts in many different ways, including being victims of sexual violence. So, under the auspices of UN's Women, Peace and Security Agenda, there has been a push to increase women's participation in these processes. And some progress has been made, but we now have a different problem.

And that is that women are present and yet they don't make an impact. They don't make influence on the outcomes of these discussions. They don't impact the agenda. They don't, sort of what they say doesn't come into the sort of last versions of the agreements, etc., etc. So this is what we call the problem of presence without impact.

This is a problem of cross-court in politics in general, not just in post-conflict contexts. And a lot of thinking has been going into both on the academic side and practitioner's side

how to ensure women's meaningful participation. And I've been struck that there is a lot of thinking in whether women are in the leading places, who women represent, whether women represent their parties, their party ideologies, or women's interests, etc., etc. But again, I was interested in, again, these patterns of talk. How women talk. Can we establish that there's something that's happening? So this research

has led to, for example, just to single out some, one finding that women do not form deliberative enclaves. What that means, in a large group of people where we have men and women sitting together, men speak in succession and follow each other much more often than women. And this allows men to amplify the points that they make

amongst each other and therefore make an influence on the outcome. Whereas women's speech is fragmented and isolated and doesn't translate into influence. Again,

In turn, this has led to further research, drilling deeper, looking at these micro-dimensions of talk and to find what I call discursive agency. In other words, studying very closely

what happens when two people talk? So for example, who interrupts whom and why? Whether to shift topic to undermine their authority or for example, to just co-complete a sentence and affirm the authority of the speakers. So a lot can be learned and together with my colleagues within this ERC project that I have mentioned, we're really pushing boundaries

to explain how women's talk is silenced in the context of their, in the same room with men, on the one hand, but also where we can find at the micro level the openings for women to make themselves heard and to resist men's domination of talk.

So a lot of my research has been about talk, but through studying talk, and especially talk about war crimes, I have also learned to respect the silence.

And this insight has come through my research on wartime sexual violence, specifically in Bosnia. I've done a research project together with colleagues where we looked at femicide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Femicide is a phenomenon of women being killed just because they're women.

Femicide takes a pretty nasty form in post-conflict societies, not just because violence against women continues after the war, but because women who were victims of sexual violence are particularly likely to be victims of violence after the war.

So for example, as one woman put it, "I spent 20 days in the camp where I was raped in Bosnia," this is in Bosnia, "but physical and psychological abuse in the marriage lasted longer." So during this research, we encountered a phenomenon of women breaking silence about their ordeal nearly 30 years later.

So, what this tells us that women who were, for example, in their 30s, 40s or 50s when they were raped during the Bosnian War have decided to keep silent. Usually

Scholars talk about stigma, right? And community to the cultural values. This is the reason why you don't talk because your family and everybody else will reject you. But not in this case necessarily. These women remained silenced because they may have lost husbands to war and became sole breadwinners and they didn't want to traumatize their children. Others didn't want to be robbed of normal life.

And what was remarkable when we were doing our field work was that we found these women in their 70s, 80s and they were now starting to speak up. So this indicates to me that war crimes talk has its own temporality in the long arc of post-conflict recovery.

It shows that there is place and time for silence, but also for communication about war crimes. And it also, I think, demonstrates that as much as we are, as scientists, interested in talk, an articulation of harm is a first step on the path to redress that talk must not be fetishized.

And my interest therefore both in silence and in communication brings me to another perspective that I have taken on this topic. I have been interested in the creative practice as an alternative form of communication. So why would we need an alternative us as an alternative form of communication? Violence

visits upon victims unspeakable emotional and physical trauma. Italian Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi wrote powerfully about the limits of language to articulate and capture the horrors of Nazi crimes. And as researchers of contemporary atrocities, we too have encountered this limitation.

And here the role of arts has been a vehicle to express the unspeakable where words fail the victims. So in this respect the arts also has a role to play in political communication.

So my interest in creative practice stems from countering the denial of humanity to victims and survivors as those that I have mentioned at the start of this lecture.

When politicization of war and trauma in post-conflict societies prevents the recognition of victims, the arts can offer a wordless form of expression that captures the horrors, but it can also communicate the trauma and brutality of violence across ethnic lines.

And in this way, artistic expression becomes the language that can cut through polarization, but of course without naive belief that art can also be politicized. And this is an example of the work that I've done with colleagues. We've analyzed

an art installation by Kosovan artist Alketa Jafa Mripa and the art installation she put on together with Ana DiLelio where they went around Kosovo and collected women donating their skirts

and some even with an inscription that those skirts hold a secret and put them on a display in a football stadium in the capital Pristina in order to address the stigma within the Albanian community but also to highlight the need for redress.

And this creative practice has also led to my practical engagement with Creative with Arts as a co-organizer and co-curator of the exhibition at the LSE of the works of the Ukrainian artists with the aim to convey multiple layers of trauma

and recovered the individual humanity lost among the humanizing narrative surrounding russia's invasion of ukraine and atrocities on ukraine's territory this links me to my conclusion so before offering any definitive conclusion i'd like to say that each discovery that pushed

the boundaries of my field has made me realize how much we do not know and how much it is yet to discover with smarter theories and sharper methodologies the tools of our trade. After every conflict we encounter politicization of harm and justice, just as we face victims' demands for recognition and justice.

My research has charted the communication pathway to post-conflict recovery and reconciliation by investigating this micro-interactional dynamics that can have broader impact.

I think wars divide and polarize, and it is upon us as researchers to support the possibility of ethical peace by recognizing and studying the openings for repair of relations, which I have shown exist at the bottom-up level, despite national divisions. In doing so, we face new opportunities and challenges.

Technological innovation has opened up a whole new field of digital practice and a new space for reconciliation, and so has the recognition of the role of arts in reconciliation and peace-building practice. Recent challenges to the global liberal order and to the norm of non-impunity

arguably make it even more pressing to better understand how the victims of violence can be given dignity and justice despite all odds. Thank you. I would very much like to thank you.

all in the audience for coming to the lecture and for listening so attentively, even to those technical bits that are hard to pronounce. I would like to thank my head of department, Professor Simon Glendening,

for providing supporting environment for work. I would like to thank my European Institute and other LSE colleagues for being there for advice, guidance, companionship and inspiration. There is a lot you can learn in this place for smart people all around. It kind of happens by osmosis.

I'd like to express gratefulness to all my collaborators at LSE and beyond in this country and abroad for working on various projects and making the usually long academic journey fun and for being there through highs and lows. All those rejections. Papers, projects, etc. I'm also indebted to all the research participants

especially victims and some very, very brave people, human rights activists. And above all, I would like to thank my husband, David Pankhurst, our children, my parents, my brother, my relatives, my parents-in-law for being there with me on this journey. Right. Thank you, Denise. That was wonderful. We have at least 35 minutes now for some, well, possibly for some deliberation.

Lots of questions. I did want to ask though first, if I may take the chair's privilege, about what can prevent it being the case that deliberation happens? So if deliberation is a certain kind of way of talking to each other which is very effective or hopefully effective within post-conflict resolution, obviously not all conversation becomes deliberative.

It can just fail as deliberation. And one of the questions from online was actually about whether circumstances where one side, as it were, recalls the atrocities that were committed to them and use that to deny the atrocities any significance that is supposed to be happening to others. That doesn't sound like deliberation at all.

Deliberation is a kind of a very special kind of moment, but it's obviously one that can fail. What in your work, as it were, produces the breaks or the interruptions or just transforms conditions so that deliberation becomes impossible? Becomes impossible or possible? Impossible, difficult, or it just fails, it doesn't happen.

Well, there is a lot of work that has been done in my field or why it doesn't happen. So that is one explanation that people start doing this competition, right? Who's South Bétemont? That they use identities as weapons, right? Rather than some bridge to reach understanding.

I mean, what was very interesting from the case that I showed was that the situation was created for people to discuss towards some goals. So, for example, in this case it was to discuss the statute of this commission that could help all of them.

Other research in our field, they have studied dialogues where the idea is, and it has been done from, for example, with the Israelis and Palestinians and elsewhere in the Balkans, where people are brought into the same room and the idea was to familiarize each other with what happened.

scholars have argued that they haven't really worked, right? That you have this kind of competition kicks in. So my hunch there would be is to create settings where maybe they could collaborate towards the same, the speakers would collaborate towards some goal or something from which both would benefit. That just creating a setting which would be

a kind of a talking shop would not be helpful. So that would be one possible way to look at it. But certainly, empirical evidence

to the limitations of just pure dialogues and discussions for the dialogue's sake. Interesting, interesting. Okay, questions coming. So let's start. When I pick you out, please wait for the mic to get to you and you can say who you are and give your question briefly.

you know very likely of this place at one time and various other ones as well um i'm probably one of the relatively few people in the street who has been a to christina b to albania which are related places and some of the things i might say have relationship but my first question was

Have you looked at this in other contexts? So I was thinking about truth and reconciliation in South Africa. Do we have any experiences of that? As a half German as well, I was wondering whether you looked at the earlier German experiences coming to terms with the war and also the differences there between what was happening, let's say, in West Germany and in East Germany.

I was thinking about Albania because I was thinking about sort of the internal repression and coming to terms with the end of internal repression in the 90s and subsequently.

And then, last of all, I was also thinking of another experience which is somewhere else which I know of, and I know that you've been working with James Kerr Lindsay as well. Whether you had been looking at the concept of sort of art as a means of reconciliation, because again, that is something which some of my experience

of what has been going on in Cyprus and efforts to reconcile and bring communities together has been used as a means. So comment upon the generalisation as opposed to the specificity of the particular situation which you talked about. Thank you. Thank you so much. OK. Yeah, take it now and then we'll move on. OK. Yes, of course, to do research...

of this sort, we need to cover some grounds to see what was done before and what we can learn and how we can push the understanding forward. So I'll just say one thing about comparisons with South Africa.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So what is quite interesting, and I would say also indicative in the case of the commission that I studied in the Balkans, is that it did not use the word reconciliation in its title at all.

And the reason why the word reconciliation was not in the title is because reconciliation has a bit of a bad reputation in the Balkans. It has almost become a bad word, and arguably it's not only in the Balkans, which is something I think we need to contend with when we look at conflict resolution,

in other contexts and now after we know what happens to the concept of reconciliation. Reconciliation becomes a dirty word because people in post-conflict societies feel that it is basically

pushed on them, right? That it is pushed on them by foreign donors, it is pushed on them by funding projects where they say you'll get money for the project if you get one Muslim, one Serbian, one Kosovan to sit together, then it is an artificial process on one hand.

And on the other hand, it is rejected because people know that their cynical elites use this concept of reconciliation to pretend they're doing something they're not doing something. So I think there's a lot to learn there, how we go about repairing relations.

and also when we speak about reconciliation, what we mean by that. People often think that if they embrace reconciliation, they have to forgive, for example, what happened to them. So that is another bundle of problems. So that's kind of

just one aspect in terms of how the initiative that I studied is different from the South Africa Food and Reconciliation Commission. Obviously,

Germany is a matter of, you know, you can't discuss post-conflict justice without discussing Germany. German case, German case in a sense of it being always flagged as a model, as a model of

a nation coming to terms and accepting responsibility for the crimes that were committed in the name of its own nation. But the question is how far this German model travels and how far it is applicable.

Again, there are many different aspects that we could discuss here, but I think a major difference that we see between German experience and, let's say, the state with the Balkans here, is that we had a total defeat in the case of Germany. Zero hour.

In the Balkans, you don't, you know, wars, many wars don't really end with such a kind of decisive, total defeat.

So it is much more difficult in that context to, for example, if you look at Serbian nationalists, some of them still think that they won't. So they don't really feel that they should engage with the crimes that were committed by members of their nation or in their own name.

Not to mention the economic aspect of reconciliation. We know that the Marshall Plan rolled in, right? So the Germans began to revisit, especially in the 60s, what the parents had done in the context of economic prosperity, right?

Whereas in many conflicts, not only do you don't have prosperity, you have corruption. And so structurally, there are the forces that in a way make the issues that are always to kind of almost symbolic kind of being swept under the carpet. So...

I'm doing an EPQ on a similar topic in terms of creative processes but in terms of in Northern Ireland and I was wondering what your opinions are on creative processes as in whether they're

whether they're sometimes used to push forward for peace or whether they're sometimes more destructive in that they sort of fan flames. For example, like if you're looking at documentary photography, for example, is that, for example, more objective and thus could it be less constructive?

Thanks very much. Do you want to take that straight off? Yes, I think it's a great question and there are lots of experts in this room who could answer this more competently than I could.

But from my perspective, not just documentary photography, there are lots of different forms of art that have been quite impactful in the case of "Modern Ireland." For example, you can only look at murals, and I think they are the best example.

how art can work both ways, right? How art can entrench those communal boundaries. But it's also interesting that also those murals, when you have non-sectarian murals popping up, they show that something may be changing in some sections of the community there.

But I think you kind of suggested something which is quite important, and that is that we have to be careful also not to instrumentalize art, right? Because then, you know, artistic practice can just go the same way as what I've mentioned reconciliation goes, right? Once the funders start putting money into arts in some sort of crude ways,

ways that weren't really considered, like, you know, undermine their own goal. And I think creative practice as a form of peace building is very new.

And but, you know, there are lots of things that we need to understand better. So we don't end up also undermining this possible alternative route to peace building. OK, thank you very much. We've got one here at the front and then we've got another here and then we'll go there. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

LSEIQ asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why do people believe in conspiracy theories or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for LSEIQ wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.

So, yeah, please. Thank you. Stephanie Schwan-Besiewicz from Bournemouth University. Thank you, David. This was a fantastic talk. Speak up a little, please. I thought I know a lot about your books and your works, but I still learned a lot today. And it was beautiful to see the journey and that you described this journey of how things have developed and built upon each other and how you got from there to here. Lots to follow up. So I have a really specific question here, which is about...

interdisciplinarity and methods. Because you have always been, for me, an example of interdisciplinarity. I remember how we talked years ago about human geography and anthropology, how that came together, interdisciplinography. Yet you're also a political scientist and what you do now has a lot to do with discourse analysis, coding, and

and also psychology and arts matters. So it's really rich in terms of methods. And I just wondered where you see where you are in terms of methods of interdisciplinarity and where you're going from here. Where are you going next? - Okay, good. Question on method. - Yes, question. That's one of my favorites.

Well, you know, when we think about interdisciplinarity, the idea is that when you bring methods together, you come up with something that neither method could produce, or discipline, rather, could produce. So something extra. So this work, for example, that I've mentioned about how women talk,

has come from something that I've always been interested in as a matter of fact as an undergraduate I did a lot of study of linguistics and sociolinguistics so that work has come from marrying linguistics with political science methods

which has completely created sort of a new understanding. We were looking in one of our papers how sort of the form of questions that women ask, right, whether that allows them to challenge policy or not, right? Contrasting, looking at whether women will ask polar questions in the same way as men.

Polar questions typically, you know, from journalists, you know, when they quiz someone, they will use yes or no form of questions. Have you done that? Have you not done that? And we've looked at, for example, whether women use polar questions in the parliament.

as opposed to men, whether they're more aggressive. And we actually found that yes, on that level, women are as aggressive, kind of debunking all these ideas that women are more polite and timid in parliaments. So there is a lot of scope.

for further innovation, for example, by looking just at language, merging linguistics and political science. So I'll just stop there with that. Okay, I've got a technical problem, which is that I can't seem to scroll these questions. Every time people ask new questions, the last one goes. So I'm going to have to help myself to one of these in a moment. But we were here right now, and then we're moving back there.

Hello, I'm Tim Merson. I studied anthropology here many, many moons ago. I was thinking about the South African model, which was a previous question I asked about. And I was thinking then in terms of about reconciliation. It was rather sad to hear you say that that's become a dirty word. I was wondering the other side of the coin, which seems to fuel so much conflict, is how you can manage retribution.

at a personal level and how people, their desire for justice, but at the same time trying to get them, if I can use that word, to reconcile themselves to the position they're in. Thank you so much. That's a really good question. So there is a huge discussion in my field

how to address the legacy of atrocities. So there is thinking that there is no justice without punishment. So the idea here is that

unless you go down the routes of war crimes trials, people will not feel that justice has been done at all and that other efforts such as truth commissions or memorialization is just the second best. However,

The problem is when we talk about mass atrocity, that's what mass atrocity is. It's criminality on a vast scale. So for example, Yugoslavia tribunal just processed just over 100 people at millions and millions and millions, the incredible cost of money and time.

I think that was important, but it left so many people dissatisfied and robbed of justice. There are domestic processes going on. So what I'm just trying to say here is that in the context of mass atrocities crime, it will not be possible, even if the issue is not politicized, to process everyone. And this is what makes it very tricky and very hard.

And this is why people are thinking about what could be another way. So the big push at the moment is, and the discussion in the field is about memorialization. So would it be possible to address

some of the negative consequences of inability to process all perpetrators in the courts with some alternative mechanisms that would still recognize and acknowledge the victims. It's very hard. Now, there was a question from somebody online. It's very, very long, and it comes from a lawyer.

I'm not going to read it all, but I'm going to read the end. If you could pass that back to me. Oh, here we go. So it's Annabella Atanasio, who is a former legal advisor to many groups in the mission in Kosovo. Now, at the end of a very long question, which I can't read out,

She asks: In your experience, how do you see a solution to ensure women are invited and participate in peace negotiations affecting them and their respective country? Because she's got a long list of cases where they're simply not there. I think women have to fight for it, right? To be included.

So, there are different ways that women can influence. So, for example, women's advocacy groups. There are models of shadow, parallel,

um negotiations or parallel courts for example bosnia had the case where women organized women's court right to bring the issues to issues to the table maybe there should be some education also of men right to um

to make them aware that if everybody's interest is a durable and longer peace, one route to achieve this is to include more women into these negotiations. Probably from a more kind of sort of hardcore feminist stance, the answer would be to fight the patriarchy, but...

Again, it depends who you ask. But I think this is a broader sort of conversation and it is in a way fight to have. Okay, good. Thank you. I already picked somebody out, didn't I? Here, yeah. Hi. Oh, it's this one.

Hi. First of all, thank you so much for your lecture. So I'm a current student at the European Institute. I'm studying the MSc in International Migration and Public Policy. I'm from Colombia, and I'm writing my dissertation on post-peace steel force displacement.

So I wanted to ask a question about the women in peacemaking and how do we balance women's experiences and their relative silence while also trying to ensure that women have meaningful participation in peacemaking processes which often are starting very soon after the conflict and after their experience.

Thank you. Yes, that is a great question. There are different perspectives from which this question could be taken. So, women's... If we talk about silence in terms of women

who do not wish to talk about what happened to them, having the right to be silent, I think that has to be respected. However, that is completely different from understanding that those women have needs. Again, we have experts in this audience who know more about this than I do.

But, for example, for these women, for example, who wish to be silent and who are victims of conflict-related sexual violence, they too are in need of therapy, right? So there must be ways found at the communal level that they're ensured, that they're given help in the ways that will not compromise their privacy and their right to be silent.

That's just one example. Okay. Hands up again. Yeah. In the blue jumper. No, down here. Yeah, that's right.

Hello, I'm Max. Thank you for giving this talk today. I just wanted to ask, with regards to technologies, how do you think greater access to translation technology, video reporting technology, and just things like mobile phones and translation could affect reconciliation and deliberation efforts in the future? Do you think it would be wholly positive? That's sort of the semblance I have. I guess I'm quite hopeful. Or do you think there could be some negative outcomes from it?

I think that's a fantastic question. I think technology is currently dramatically changing the works of justice, not just criminal justice, but also opening the other spaces. On the one hand, you have something

that's radically different than without social media and that is piles of evidence that is being created that can be used in prosecutions.

But also there are problems in that not every photograph and anything that's taken on your cameras, on your phone can serve as evidence. So I think it can be admissible as evidence, for example, because either it's taken anonymously or it's not clear when it's taken or where it's taken, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a lot of work there to understand

how we can help, right? The fact that technology can provide evidence and make processing of crimes easier, right?

On the other hand, we know that social media can have, you know, both ways, right? Also allow discussion of things, and which they do, but as well, sort of, you know, spread hate speech and war crimes denial.

So these two processes pull in different ways, but certainly open up, create new dynamics. I was quite fascinated to read a book by a young scholar who was looking at TikTok and other social media in the context of former Yugoslavia.

and she wrote about algorithmic reconciliation, that actually the people who were participating in these chat rooms and all of a sudden finding people from different groups and starting the conversations about what happened in the war were pushed algorithms that made them meet new and more people

across ethnic lines and start more conversations that facilitated this intergroup understanding. So there is a lot out there and a lot for us as scholars to catch up.

and a lot to think in terms of policy. For example, there are NGOs that are working and documenting human rights that are just

overwhelmed by the masses of evidence. So it's kind of interesting where this artificial intelligence will also come in here to see where this goes in the future. But certainly there is a lot of new stuff to grapple with, both as academics and practitioners, and also sort of creating

opportunities that can both undermine the quest for justice but also promote it. There are quite a few questions from outside which are concerned with the intractability of certain conflicts and also what you were earlier calling the victim Olympics where it just seems to get worse when people are talking. I was just wondering if in those cases

Does an interruption of that have to take place through something like efforts at forgiveness, for example, which is where you remember sharply what happened, but you're going to forgive the person who did it? Or on the other hand, perhaps something like amnesty, where, as it were, there's a structure of forgetting it?

putting it away, not remembering it. So forgiveness and amnesty are these methods of interruption? Are they absolutely hopeless or as it were are they absolutely necessary at some point? So I would just

a little bit of agency into that question. Who is, you know, doing this victim Olympics? And who are the, I mean, who are these people, right, who have an interest in protracting and continuing conflicts? Because I think that kind of perspective where you, you know, I don't want to say just...

It's too simple to say, generalize. But then you forget to kind of dissect analytically why would someone inflate the numbers and have an interest not to end the conflict.

And without understanding those dynamics, I think it's easier to overlook possibilities for conflicts. In the worst conflicts, you always have communication that's going across ethnic lines. And if there is, I think, one way to... one answer would be is to support those efforts. Interesting. Yes, one there, and then we'll come down to the front here.

Hi, thank you. Hi, Denisa. Thank you so much for the lecture. My question is more practical. I'm wondering what do you think about where we are in terms of reconciliation in the Balkans, whether we're on the right path and if we're making progress towards it and how can we measure it actually? Brief. So maybe the best way is to think of reconciliations in the plural form.

because there is no one sort of understanding of reconciliation and as a matter of fact without defining exactly what you mean by reconciliation then we come into all kinds of misunderstanding of misunderstandings of what's happening. I would just say what is one big problem in the region

I think it's a lack of contact, and especially the lack of contact among young people. That's remarkable. You have young, for example, Serbs and Albanians

who've never been in each other country, just regurgitating the worst nationalism of the elites. And yet when they randomly meet each other somewhere else in a completely different setting, they understand how much they actually have in common. And I was always surprised why in its

response to the wars in the Western Balkans. The EU has completely overlooked what's worked for, for example, Franco-German reconciliation, a lot of exchanges of students, and this still doesn't exist in the region.

Right, we've got time for one very quick last question and if perhaps appropriate we'll end where we began with Paul Wallace.

Wait for your microphone, sir. I'd like to ask about temporality. Yes. Because that seems to be fascinating but extremely complicated. I'm conscious that many of those involved in the Second World War, for example, found it impossible to talk about for decades afterwards and only talked about it when they were old. But on the other hand, I can see that when things are fresh,

it may be easy to stop them sinking in deeply in Yugoslavia. On the other hand, the Yugoslav grievances bubble up again after being suppressed by communism for many, many years. So how does one manage that? And as long as one leaves it, memory echoes into myth and then into historical grievances.

I once took a group of students round Belfast. The tour started with a former IRA member

beginning his talk by saying it all began to go wrong in 1601. Southeastern Europe is covered in historical weaknesses like that, so where do you start? Okay, thanks. Well, maybe I'll just start with this initiative that I've studied.

that didn't use the word reconciliation in the title because the word is so politicized. Their only goal is to record war deaths. Everyone. I mean, this is almost, if you like, an apolitical undertaking. Why would it be a problem to just record the circumstances so we know what happened?

But that, I think, would have a huge impact because it would recognize what happened to people as individuals, right? It would set the record, but a record in such a way that it cannot be abused so the facts then become myths.

Balkans is awash with myths because there are no facts. That's the problem. Listen, welcoming Denisa into the European Institute was my first act actually as head of department seven years ago. Denisa wanted to come to us from the government department here at the LSE and I was asked if I would agree to that move that she would come to the European Institute.

It was my first good decision to say yes. Thank you very much, Denise. Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.uk forward slash events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.