Contact
Work group
Human Rights
Alexa Stiller is a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary History at the Department of History at the University of Zurich. She has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York City, the University of Oxford, St. Antony's College, ETH Zurich, and the University of Konstanz. She has received fellowships from the USHMM, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, and the German Historical Institutes in Washington D.C. and Warsaw. Alexa Stiller's most recent award-winning book deals with the Nazi policy of Germanization and mass violence in the occupied countries of Poland, France, and Slovenia (Göttingen 2022). She has researched and published on the Nuremberg Trials (New York 2012, Hamburg 2018). Her current research project (working title: Visions of Accountability. The Emergence of the International Criminal Law Regime, 1989-2002) examines the establishment of the international criminal tribunals in response to the Bosnian War and the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s.
Working Group
Economy
Research Project
Visions of Accountability. The Emergence of the International Criminal Law Regime, 1989-2002
The long 1990s were the golden decade for international criminal law: 45 years after the two International Military Tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo, the two ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the permanent International Criminal Court, were established in The Hague and Arusha. What historical circumstances and factors led to the emergence of the international criminal law regime? Which groups of actors were involved? The research project assumes that the international criminal law regime was actively created by different groups of actors. Lawyers, human rights activists, international organizations, and various governments around the world were involved. It examines the different interests and alliances of the various actors. It argues that a new and powerful discourse emerged in the early 1990s, referred to as the "vision of accountability". It was based on the idea of prosecuting past injustices, gross violations of human rights, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide, punishing the perpetrators and providing justice to the victims. This new discourse led to a new way of looking at mass violence and international law, and to a new way of dealing with wars and civil wars at the international level. New instruments and institutions were created, including the establishment of international criminal courts. The aim of this research project is to re-evaluate the emergence and institutionalization of the ad hoc tribunals and the permanent International Criminal Court through a comprehensive historical contextualization and historicization.