Description
While historical revisionism is commonly used to justify offensive foreign policies, little scholarly attention in International Relations is paid to its scope, development, and importance in the Western Balkans where state-sponsored revisionism of the histories of the 1990s is widespread. To advance the knowledge of revisionism in International Relations, this paper investigates how historical revisionism, particularly atrocity crimes denial, has emerged, developed, and grown in states’ domestic and foreign policy practices in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper maps out the use of historical revisionism by governments in these three countries during post-conflict reckonings with the past between 2004 and 2022 to establish the endogenous and extraneous factors influencing the rise of such revisionist behaviours. In particular, the paper investigates how international normative commitments placed upon these countries after conflict, such as the obligations concerning cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, have influenced and transformed historical revisionism. Drawing conclusions about these three cases, the paper seeks to contribute to scholarly understanding of what enables revisionist states in international society and provide new empirical insights on the links between revisionism, status, and the international normative order in International Relations.
