ABSTRACT

As jurisprudence and trial records clearly show, international criminal trials regularly encounter lexical elements of cognitive provenance veiled by complex contextual, historical, sociopolitical and cultural factors. Combining a historical approach to evidence with a linguistic analysis, Robert Donia’s chapter follows a hybrid methodology commonly used by professional historians to reveal the meanings and connotations in the language used by significant historical actors as expressed at the time. As Donia puts it, “My purpose here is to show that tracking a movement’s semantic innovations can yield valuable insights into its leaders’ guiding principles, intentions and plans […].” Donia places the Serbo-Croatian concept of the narod, commonly translated as ‘a people’ or ‘a nation,’ at the center of his study. His focus is on the use of narod mainly by the Bosnian Serb leadership, who, as Donia points out, “enhanced the everyday meaning of Serb narod by attributing to it semantically the qualities of elasticity, anthropocentricity, suffering and congenital impossibility of committing genocide.” Along with the use of slurs and discriminatory language revolving around the lexical constellation of the lead concept, Donia’s chapter reveals how Bosnian Serb propagandists intentionally employed ‘semantic innovations’ in order to cognitively condition the targeted groups for the armed conflict and the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.