Law & Literature | 2019
The Sword and the Shield: The Uses of Poetry at the War Crimes Trial of Radovan Karadžić, the Poet-Warrior1
Abstract
Abstract A substantial body of scholarship has developed addressing the narrative importance poetry plays in understanding war and conflict. This article develops a new thread in that conversation by examining how poetry and the discussion of poets served multiple, competing, and sometimes outright contradictory purposes at the four-and-a-half-year-long war crimes trial for Radovan Karadžić, a Bosnian Serb leader during the third Yugoslav War. The article endeavors to classify each of the principal ways poetry was used as evidence or as argument at Karadžić s trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. A review of 47,659 pages of the public trial transcripts reveals that poetry and discussion of poets served both as a sword and a shield, depending on whether the prosecution or defense invoked poetry and poets, and why. Finally, the article comments on poetry s narrative import for the legal-historic record of Karadžić s trial and the precedent it sets for including creative arts in prosecutions for war crimes – a precedent with utility for deterrence and vigilance in an increasingly fractured international scene.