Exploring the Schelling conjecture in reverse

Abstract

Students of bargaining have long focused on the dual nature of international negotiations, which take place both internationally and domestically. The prevailing wisdom is that under certain conditions political leaders can use domestic constraints to get a better deal at the negotiating table. In this article, I argue that under certain conditions leaders have an incentive to use 'international constraints' to pressure their domestic constituents into accepting a particular policy. I apply this argument to the Serbian and Croatian cases of Western pressure for cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (Hague Tribunal).

Reactive remembrance: The political struggle over apologies and reparations between Germany and Namibia for the Herero genocide

“…The article's findings speak to broader concerns about greater accountability for mass atrocities. Within human rights scholarship, scholars have paid great attention to the increase in human rights trials and prosecutions (Kelsall 2006;Kim and Sikkink 2010;Grodsky 2011;Sikkink 2011) in addition to lustration laws, amnesties, and truth commissions (Olsen, Payne, Reiter, Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2010;Hirsch 2014) as ways to overcome legacies of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Although apologies have figured prominently among these tools of transitional justice (Brooks 1999;Gibney and Roxstrom 2001;Barkan and Karn 2006;Gibney, Howard-Hassmann, Coicaud, and Steiner 2008;Lind 2008;Nobles 2008;Renner 2011), understanding better when and why states are more likely to actually embrace these tools can help activists to identify windows of opportunity and lobby appropriate actors.…”