Legacies in the Making at the ICTY

Viviane Dittrich re-visits the institutional endeavour of leaving a legacy in light of completion, closure, and continuation. Her contribution explores how the proliferation of tribunal-driven legacy projects and efforts of documentation, memorialization, and legacy building has shaped and continues shaping the actual legacy process. The chapter shows that legacy formation is a continuous process, placing the social construction of legacies at the centre of the analysis. The chapter sets the approaches of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in perspective in relation to its Completion Strategy and the ongoing work of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. In view of the impending closure of the Tribunal and the spectre of organizational death, the chapter discusses legacy building in terms of language, conceptualization, and institutionalization.