This dissertation explores how historical narratives were constructed and contested within trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and how those constructions and contestations changed over time. Through an archival analysis of sixteen testimonies, given by five ‘historical expert witnesses’, across eight trials, it examines legal testimony as a genre of historical production. In doing so, this study demonstrates that the ICTR’s historical experts constructed historical narratives through their interactions with legal actors. Initially, they did so by establishing a space between evidence (fact) and interpretation (narrative), which they were eager, and enabled, to navigate. Over time, that space stretched, contracted, sedimented, and then deteriorated, as the narrators of history were challenged, or changed their stories; and their questioners grew more knowledgeable, more sceptical, and changed their questioning strategies. These interactions between historical and legal actors consisted of contestations over evidence, interpretation, methodology, and authority, and shaped the immediate historical narratives of the trials in which they took place, as well as the narrative jurisprudence of the Tribunal as a whole.

This dissertation makes three key contributions to existing research on history and international criminal trials. First, the granular study of more than 13,000 pages of transcripts contributes a deep, empirical, micro-historical understanding of the processes by which history was narrated at the ICTR. Second, an analysis of courtroom interactions in transcripts contributes a potential new methodological approach to ‘observing’ trials. Third, this work contributes to existing scholarship analysing the relationship between law and history in the wake of mass atrocity. It problematises the expressive, or performative function of legal transitional justice mechanisms, and argues that the apparently authoritative and robust histories in judgements rest, in fact, upon fragile narrative webs.

You can find UvA dissertations in the UvA-DARE database.