The Edge of Law

Explores the political and social consequences of establishing a new legal system in the wake of violent conflict.

This book explores the fraught process of establishing trials for war crimes following violent conflict, such as in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. This process can be seen as inherently spatial: creating new concepts of inclusion and exclusion and new understandings of the appropriate division of territory.The Edge of Law explores the spatial implications of establishing a new legal institution in the wake of violent conflict. Using the example of the establishment of the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Alex Jeffrey argues that legal processes constantly demarcate a line of inclusion and exclusion: materially, territorially and corporally. In contrast to accounts that have focused on the judicial outcomes of these transitional justice efforts, The Edge of Law draws on long-term fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina to focus on the social and political consequences of the trials, tracing the fraught mechanisms that have been used by international and local political elites to convey their legitimacy. This book will be of interest to socio-legal and geographical scholars working in the fields of transitional justice, legal systems, critical geopolitics and criminology.