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Chapter 4 - Enduring Injustice: Perceptions of Justice and Accountability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2026

Anna Katila
Affiliation:
City University London
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Summary

This chapter engages with critiques about international criminal tribunals that centre on dissatisfaction with justice. It argues that reframing the debate to focus on the bearable level of injustice would invite reflection over and help revise expectations of justice. Engaging with legal and transitional justice scholarship, the chapter analyses Raoul Peck’s film Sometimes in April and Kitty Felde’s play A Patch of Earth together with the ICTR case Prosecutor v. Nahimana et al. and the ICTY case Prosecutor v. Erdemović. These reflective narratives complicate the limits of criminal accountability, and the chapter approaches them through the themes of responsibility, blame and agency. Differentiating between justice and justness, the chapter demonstrates how perceptions of just justice are subjective and dependent on who else is held accountable and how. The chapter also moves outside of the ICTY and ICTR to examine alternative pursuits of justice: impunity through silence and revenge. This reveals that some gaps in justice processes are acceptable while others are unbearable.

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