Bones and recognition: Compensating families of missing persons in post-War bosnia and herzegovina

Abstract

A growing trend in post-war transitional justice posits that structural conditions explain why only some post-war countries award material assistance to survivors of war atrocities. While these explanations provide critical insights into the processes behind compensation adoption across post-war states, they do not explain the great variance in which victims obtain compensation within post-war countries. Using the case of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a victim category that secured compensation in 2004, I present a new model to explain compensation using a rationalist approach. The paper shows that compensation adoption is primarily driven byan opportune combination of three factors: international salience (defined as the international attention givento the victim category and/or prioritisation of its demands), moral authority (defined as the level of perceived domestic deservingness for compensation) and mobilisation resources (defined as the victim category’s capacities to mobilise and the quality of its networks). Drawing on fieldwork, this article shows that the prominence of the Srebrenica genocide propelled the issue of missing persons on to domestic and external agendas, affording the surviving families an opportunity to demand special compensation.