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could be catastrophic for the Serbian nation because it will be written
in history that the Serbs are responsible for genocide.”5
In analyzing this reaction, this paper proposes that social identity and self-categorization,
as elaborated primarily by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, are intervening mechanisms that help
explain this negative social reaction to international criminal law. I use this pair of social
psychological theories to argue that it is the belief in a group threat, directed against a social
identity that an individual feels incapable of escaping, which produces a strong selfcategorization
as a group member and predicts the function of social identity mechanisms—that
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is, a feeling of oneness with the other members of a particular in-group and distance from a
particular out-group. The direction of these unified social attitudes, and the orientation of the
state-level decision-maker, will then vary depending on the content of the self-stereotype. In the
Serbian case, this paper argues that there was far less social identification at the national level,
and greater diversity of national political opinion, before the NATO bombing in 1999. However,
the NATO bombing constituted an inescapable threat at the national level, creating an
atmosphere in which Serbians felt they were all treated alike regardless of their political opinion;
this group-level, inescapable threat produced a greater sense of in-group homogeneity and
identification. Rather than differentiating themselves primarily against the Milosevic regime,
previously dissident Serbs changed their salient out-group and began differentiating themselves
primarily against the Western countries participating in the bombing. The significance of notions
of rebelliousness and victimhood in the Serbian self-stereotype helped further define an
international stance that rejected the kind of post-war solution offered by the ICTY.
THE 1990S AND DEVELOPMENTS IN THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW PARADIGM
Understanding Serbian perceptions of the ICTY requires some contextualization of the
reemerging international criminal law paradigm. After lying dormant for nearly fifty years, the
concept of the international criminal court is once again becoming an established feature of the
international system. At the most general level, this is often attributed to major systemicstructural
change in terms of the end of bipolarity: during the Cold War, fulfilling the norm of
humanitarian justice for individual civilians presented too much of a threat to national
sovereignty interests.6 Meanwhile, the varied international reactions to the revival of this idea—
in particular, the heated resistance of the US to the idea of the permanent international criminal
court—suggests that this is not the only relevant variable.
The 1992 establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) nonetheless represented a major turning point in international perspectives on violence
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against civilians in the context of war. Though the Genocide Convention and the Geneva
Conventions, which spell out the responsibilities of states towards civilians during war, had been
in existence since 1949, they contained no international enforcement mechanism. Therefore,
while they were commonly referenced in the period between their founding and 1990, they were
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