International Injustice: Humanitarian Intervention and the Abuse of War Crimes Trials

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International Humanitarian Intervention and the Abuse of War Crimes Trials is a critical examination of Western military humanitarian interventions, with a particular focus on subsequent Western-organized war crimes trials that serve as post-facto justifications for the resort to force. International Injustice analyzes the NATO-led humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia during the 1990s, an intervention that to this day continues to be cited as a successful exemplar of how to use force to achieve humanitarian outcomes. NATO’s bombing campaigns—first in Bosnia-Herzegovina, then in Serbia—were accompanied by innumerable war crimes trials of NATO’s designated adversaries, held under the auspices of The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). As this book shows, however, the ICTY was inextricably bound up with the issue of whom to assign blame for the violent breakup of Yugoslavia and for the wars that followed.