Chapter 4 is the first of the three chapters that draw on interviews, observations, and life stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina to narrate a story about what ‘Never Again’ means for the people in this country and formulate a claim about transitional justice’s complicity in the construction of conflict recurrence anxieties. This chapter proposes that the lack of state-sponsored, state-wide truth recovery and a national dialogue about the characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of the war creates anxieties about potential conflict repetition. It then demonstrates how the global project of transitional justice is complicit in creating and sustaining these anxieties. In particular, the chapter shows how the normative hierarchy of transitional justice and the positioning of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a key source of the historical status quo helped enhance the building of multiple, competing, and often parallel biographical narratives about the war that prolong anxieties about potential conflict recurrence.

This chapter explores whether the feminist form of justice of the Women’s Court provides the basis for developing a more emancipatory model of international justice. It considers how this feminist approach reveals the double bind of the global legal form: that legal justice is necessary but the existing legal order does not provide it. This problem reflects wider feminist and Marxist debates concerning whether law can provide the basis for emancipatory social transformation. The chapter argues for a ‘transitional’ feminist approach to international criminal law, which develops strategies to build alternative feminist forms of international justice and contributes to the struggle to create the conditions for the emergence of new forms of social organisation. It sets out how the feminist form of justice of the Women’s Court provides the basis for developing a feminist approach to international criminal justice. Drawing on feminist legal and political theory, the chapter uses the model of feminist justice to develop new legal concepts of gender-based harms, legal proceedings, subjects, and justice. It shows how these provide four key elements of an alternative conceptual framework for a feminist approach to international criminal law.

This chapter examines the feminist approach to justice of the Women’s Court, a leading feminist alternative justice mechanism held in the former Yugoslavia. It describes the critique of existing models of international justice in the Women’s Court, together with its development of a new paradigm of justice and its building of an alternative justice mechanism. The chapter identifies the fundamental categories of the new feminist paradigm of justice: (1) transformative feminist justice; (2) gender-based harms; (3) feminist justice proceedings; (4) feminist judgement; and (5) subjects of justice. Drawing on feminist psychoanalytic theory, the chapter analyses the discursive structure and operation of this feminist model of justice, showing it expresses alternative forms of global exchange between women as subjects of justice. It argues that the Women’s Court creates new forms of feminist knowledge, which can represent new feminist social relations and values. The chapter traces how Women’s Court both articulates the structural injustices produced by the intensification of neoliberal globalisation in the former Yugoslavia and expresses the alternative possibilities of social solidarity and emancipation that can emerge in the same global social processes.