The atrocities committed in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces, legally recognized as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), continue to leave deep scars more than thirty years later. The coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing across eastern Bosnia resulted in the wanton destruction of towns and villages. It led to the near-total annihilation of rural cultural landscapes in areas under Bosnian Serb control. This study examines the long-term consequences of wartime destruction in the Srebrenica and Zepa region, focusing on spatial erasure and post-war patterns of reconstruction and return. Building on earlier quantifications of war-related devastation in the same region, this study applies a set of original indices, the Reconstruction Rate Index (RRI), Quality Reconstruction Index (QRI), and Return Index (RI), to assess post-war recovery across 23 villages. To complement these measures, a Land Use Index (LUI) quantifies changes in land use, including the expansion of overgrown areas between 1992 and 2025. It reveals ongoing spatial disruption and the erasure of rural life. Findings, anchored in a previously established Destruction Index (DI) averaging 0.98 out of 1, indicate near-total destruction of the built environment. The RRI and QRI stand at 0.19 and 0.08, demonstrating that most rebuilt homes are uninhabitable or of poor quality. Demographic recovery remains fragile, with a 2025 return index averaging 0.08, down from 0.22 in the 2013 census. The results acknowledge previously identified limitations of the return process, particularly its uneven capacity to translate reconstruction into sustained demographic and social reintegration, and extend the analysis by examining the afterlife of genocide in cultural landscapes through architectural change, settlement morphology, and village spatial organization; in this sense, post-war recovery is approached through evolving material and spatial configurations that structure rural life.
War leaves physical imprints on cities. The effects of such destruction endure for decades after hostilities end, as both tangible and intangible harms reverberate across generations. Cities are centers of political, economic, and social life and cultural production; they embody memory, history, and meaning. Urban warfare is not new; it has been a military strategy for as long as cities have existed. Yet in contemporary conflict, cities are increasingly subjected to deliberate and systematic destruction, and their large and growing populations render such violence especially devastating. Urbicide refers to the deliberate destruction of urban spaces, encompassing not only the built environment but also the social, cultural, and relational fabric of urban life, as well as the emotional well-being and lives of its inhabitants. Despite its prevalence and scale, most recently witnessed in cities across Gaza, international law does not recognize urbicide as a distinct crime. While existing legal frameworks prohibit attacks on specific civilian objects, such as hospitals and civilian property, they do not protect the city as a collective entity nor adequately capture the cumulative and systemic nature of urban destruction. This article argues for the codification of urbicide as an international crime, drawing on international cultural heritage law and related concepts such as domicide and ecocide to propose a legal definition.
In Cambodia, in the name of "revolution," between 1975 and 1979, atrocities were committed against civilians resulting in the death of two million Cambodians from starvation, illness, forced labour, torture, or execution. The Khmer Rouge (KR) regime also imposed forced marriages, which were used to advance its unique socio-political and ideological goals. While control and surveillance played vital roles in the creation and implementation of forced marriage during the genocide, little empirical research has explored the experience and impact of these mechanisms of power on everyday life. In response, this paper explores through in-depth interviews how control and surveillance were lived, perceived, and experienced during the genocide by fifty-eight survivors of forced marriage (thirty men and twenty-eight women), and nine former officials of the Khmer Rouge regime. We draw upon the work Michel Foucault and participants' experiences to examine how the concepts of control and surveillance were enacted both through and upon those tasked with enforcing the KR regime's ideology and goals, how this was accomplished, as well as its impact on survivors of forced marriage, both men and women. Ultimately, we show how control and surveillance were continually used and relied upon by the Khmer Rouge with devastating consequences.
This article offers a new interpretation of the so-called "Kakombola war," which took place in colonial Angola between 1940 and 1941. Absent from international historiography but central to the oral narratives collected by anthropologist Ruy Duarte de Carvalho from the VaKuvale, a pastoral community in the region, this episode is remembered through the term kakombola - in OluKuvale, "to take everything, leave nothing."1 Survivors use it to describe Portuguese military operations that resulted in expropriations, arrests, deportations, and the mass death of populations classified by colonial authorities as "insubordinate mucubal tribes."2 Drawing on colonieal sources and oral accounts, the article argues that these events constitute genocide in the sense proposed by Raphael Lemkin and reinterpreted by Dirk Moses: violence targeting the social, cultural, and cosmological foundations of human groups - even when such groups did not exist as discrete ethnic entities. The Kakombola war thus compels us to consider a form of genocide without a people, in which epistemic and classificatory practices were inseparable from the logic of elimination. In other words, a form of genocide in which the targeted group emerged through the very classificatory practices that justified its elimination. The article proceeds in three sections: first, it explores the ambiguous historicity of the VaKuvale and mucubais categories in southern Angola; second, it analyzes the growing conflation of mucubais with rebels between the 1920s and 1940s; finally, it reflects on the conceptual implications of the case for genocide studies.
This article examines how universal jurisdiction (UJ) over genocide operates across national jurisdictions following an analysis of prosecutions and institutional designs. Building a comprehensive dataset of forty-two UJ genocide proceedings (1961-2025), it traces applications' growth, outcomes, and the geography of commission and prosecution. Following this empirical base, the article develops a tiering typology of institutional designs - Restrictivists, In-betweeners, Practice-gated Permissives, and Expansionists - based on the UJ requirements - nexus design, double criminality, subsidiarity, temporal rules, and prosecutorial procedure and practice. A focused comparison of France and Germany, the two most expansionist's jurisdictions, reveals contrasting UJ designs: France's expansionism by exception, notably concentrated on Rwandan genocidaires versus Germany's expansionist by design, spanning multiple conflicts. Across systems, procedural design choices (nexus requirements, subsidiarity, and imprescriptibly), specialized prosecution teams, and NGOs, emerge as key determinants of case movement. The analysis shows that UJ has been institutionalized through domestic law and practice, functioning as an evolving transnational justice mechanism that can fill accountability gaps when territorial or national fora falter. The contribution is empirical, analytical, and substantive: a disaggregated and comprehensive map of UJ-based genocide prosecutions, a replicable framework for evaluating which legal-institutional levers most effectively enable (or constrain) the pursuit of genocide cases, and an in-depth comparison of two viable, yet different, routes to sustained genocide prosecutions.
Slovakia's history was entangled with imperial and colonial contexts embedded in civilizational discourse, producing racial hierarchies between "civilized" and "cultured" on the one hand and "backward" and "savage" on the other. This racialized civilizational discourse played a critical role in the wartime fascistization of Slovakia as it not only navigated Slovakia's transnational alliances but also launched the reconstruction of Slovak society from within. Yet, despite the significance of civilizational discourse in the formation of interwar and wartime Slovakia, it has never been adequately examined. That said, this paper unpacks the wartime Hlinka Slovak People's Party (HSLS) or the Ludak regime's (1939-1945) efforts to prove its racial worth by constructing a Slovak cultured nation as a pretext for recognition and membership in what Jozef Tiso, Roman-Catholic priest and president of the first Slovak Republic, saw as Christian cultured Europe. Investigating the racialized notion of Slovakia as a cultured nation and its belongingness to New Europe as a part of civilizational discourse not only allows us to examine these neglected aspects of the fascistization of 1930s and 1940s Slovakia but also engage with transnational perspectives by grasping the HSLS' regime's ties to Nazi Germany, New Europe, and a broader colonial context.
This article analyses the 1947 Yugoslav trial of General Alexander L & ouml;hr, the highest-ranking Wehrmacht officer prosecuted in post-war Yugoslavia, in order to demonstrate how a small socialist state both adapted and extended the legacy of the Nuremberg trials. Building on its involvement in the International Military Tribunal, Yugoslavia combined principles of international criminal law with its own partisan legal traditions to create a hybrid legal framework. The proceedings against L & ouml;hr addressed three central issues: the legality of strategic bombing, the recognition of partisans as lawful combatants, and the criminalization of reprisals. By rejecting restrictive interpretations of international criminal law, Yugoslav military courts anticipated subsequent codifications in the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols. Thus, the trial was both an act of national accountability and an intervention in the global evolution of the laws of war, asserting Yugoslavia's legal sovereignty and moral authority in the early Cold War era.
This essay examines the historical change in the reception of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg from the 1940s to the 1990s. Stiller analyzes the arguments presented by supporters and critics of the Nuremberg Trial in the 1940s, highlighting those that influenced experts in international criminal law in subsequent decades. Additionally, she explores how these arguments were adapted to the discourses in the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s. Over the time, two substantial shifts occurred. On the one hand, the moral necessity argument that led to the establishment of the International Military Tribunal after World War II gained support from an ever-broader range of legal professionals and human rights advocates. Conversely, since the 1960s, there have been endeavors to expand the rudimentary international criminal law established by the Nuremberg Trial to encompass colonial and decolonization crimes. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s accelerated the establishment of the international criminal law regime, which was based on discourses of retributive justice and a didactic-moral attitude toward the law. The essay argues that the Nuremberg Trial, in the discourse spanning five decades, was not merely a lieu de memoire, but also constitutes a lieu de legitimation for political usage.
While existing scholarship highlights the importance of collective identity as a driver for genocide denial by collective actors such as states, such analysis typically focuses on the ontological needs of the collective Self without taking into consideration its significant Other(s). This article argues for a postcolonial understanding of genocide denial as an epistemically violent ontological (in)security encounter between interconnected actors. Observing ontological (in)security encounters between epistemic subjects reveals different power relations between the Self and the Other at different stages of genocide, which shape the trajectories of denial. A preparatory stage of genocide might reveal a practice of epistemic violence with the purpose to create the Other as a separate, inferior epistemic subject and normalize a relation of domination of the Self over the Other, while a post-genocide context might signal a less uneven, nevertheless antagonistic relationship of co-dependence between two epistemic authorities. In situations of denial of historical genocides, otherness can also serve a source of mutual ontological security where a relationship of coexistence, or co-constitutiveness, of the Self and the Other becomes desirable. The main contribution of this article is offering a new interpretative framework for understanding the dynamics and trajectories of genocide denial and interrogating how it might be diminished or aggravated, in and through interactions between ontological security-driven needs by the communities involved. Denial is not merely a coping mechanism, but a vehicle of genocide with immense productive power that creates, discredits or erases subjectivities of political actors to not only normalize the relations of domination but also fulfil ontological needs of collective actors even after that relation of domination is transformed.
