Ivor Sokolić – författare

The extra-legal effects of international and domestic war crimes trials continue to puzzle researchers and practitioners. In the former Yugoslav states, the legacy of conflict and issues of transitional justice remains central in politics, society and culture. This book provides a new theoretical and methodological approach to one of these puzzles: why universal human rights norms become distorted or undermined when they reach local publics. It investigates the social and cultural contexts that transitional justice processes take place in by looking at how emotional everyday narratives can hamper the spread of norms in society. In Croatia, these narratives define how the public understands the rule of law, history and minority rights.

This open access book examines deliberative and anti-deliberative practices in post-conflict contexts marked by democratic backsliding. It compares how deliberative ideals are upheld and violated across different deliberative domains, including parliaments, citizens’ assemblies, social media and interactions between local and international actors. The authors identify anti-deliberation as the active violation of deliberative norms through exclusion, manipulation and domination, along with weaponisation of difference. The expansion of anti-deliberation restricts the space for good-quality deliberation and accelerates democratic backsliding.This edited collection is useful to scholars of democracy, deliberation and communication with its novel comparative perspective on the quality of deliberation, to policy-makers and civil society with its lessons for supporting deliberation, and to international peace-builders working on democratisation and reversing democratic backsliding.

The extra-legal effects of international and domestic war crimes trials continue to puzzle researchers and practitioners. In the former Yugoslav states, the legacy of conflict and issues of transitional justice remains central in politics, society and culture. This book provides a new theoretical and methodological approach to one of these puzzles: why universal human rights norms become distorted or undermined when they reach local publics. It investigates the social and cultural contexts that transitional justice processes take place in by looking at how emotional everyday narratives can hamper the spread of norms in society. In Croatia, these narratives define how the public understands the rule of law, history and minority rights.