Knowing Women

Abstract

This article considers how international criminal courts produce knowledge about women’s experiences of large-scale violence. In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia concluded that the crime of genocide had been committed in Srebrenica in 1995 and that the patriarchal nature of the Bosnian Muslim community was key to the genocide. This paper examines the processes by which the trial and appeal chambers came to know, and author an account of this community as patriarchal. I examine the transcripts of three witnesses who testified about the surviving community of Bosnian Muslim women, tracing how evidence was shaped and reshaped in the courtroom and then in the trial and appeal judgments. I argue here for the importance of exploring the mediating practices and actors that produce legal knowledge, to better understand how complex recognition of gendered harm unfolds, and is sometimes curtailed, through international criminal adjudication.