Article

‘The return of things as they were’:

New humanitarianism, restitutive desire
and the politics of unrectifiable loss

Magdalena Zolkos
Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic University, North Sydney, NSW 2059, Australia.
magdalena.zolkos@acu.edu.au

Abstract The current proliferation of restitutive claims in response to expropriation

in armed conflicts occurs at the interstices of humanitarianism and transitional justice.
Restitution indicates the expansion of the humanitarian mandate from providing
immediate relief to those who have suffered loss, to engaging in remedial, redressive
and restorative practices. That intersection between the humanitarian goals and post-
conflict justice is one of the signs of ‘new’ forms and ethos of humanitarianism. This
article offers a critical reading of the ‘restitutive desire’ underpinning the humanitarian
restitutive politics, which it relates to political fantasies of reversibility and undoing. It
locates the genealogy of restitution in Émile Durkheim’s work on the division of labour,
individualization and the distinction between repressive and restitutive law. It argues
that in the Durkheimian socio-legal tradition restitution figures as a return of ‘matters to
their former status’ and of ‘disturbed relationships to their normal form’. It then turns to
Sigmund Freud’s essay on Daniel Schreber, which defines restitution not as procedure
of undoing, but as a reparative practice that nevertheless affirms the subject’s ‘catas-
trophic loss of the world’. The Freudian perspective uncouples restitution and undoing
and asks about the possibility of restitutive politics haunted by unrectifiable loss.
Contemporary Political Theory (2017) 16, 321–341. doi:10.1057/s41296-016-0010-1;
advance online publication 29 June 2016

Keywords: restitution; undoing; new humanitarianism; unrectifiable loss; Émile

Durkheim; Sigmund Freud

In the last decades, restitution has become the default humanitarian remedy for
house, land and property expropriation during mass conflict in situations of
population displacement.1 The restitutive principle has been developed in
international human rights law in relation to ‘the right of return’ of refugees,
displaced persons and their descendants (Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Art. 13(2); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Art. 12.2 and
12.4); peaceful enjoyment of property and respect for one’s home (Universal
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Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 17); ‘the right to remedy’ (Basic Principles and
Guidelines on the Right to a remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross
Violations of International Human Right Law and Serious Violations of Interna-
tional Humanitarian Law, Art. 18 and 19); and within the UN Principles on
Housing and Property Restitution for Refugees and Displaced Persons. While some
have used the term ‘restitution’ to signify a wide ‘spectrum of attempts to rectify
historical injustice’ (Barkan, 2000, p. xix), in this article restitution is used in the
specific sense of ‘physical and legal restoration of wrongfully taken assets’, which
aims to establish the proprietarian status quo from before the conflict (Williams,
2012, p. 86). I suggest that central to this notion of restitution (and to its underlying
conception of justice) is the idea of return. The transitive and intransitive
grammatical forms of the verb ‘return’ point to two different meanings, which are
nevertheless enmeshed together in the humanitarian restitutive discourse, in
particular when expropriation accompanies population displacement: first, return of
the seized belongings to their owners and, second, return to a previous place or
circumstance (in the sense of repatriation and as the political fantasy of reinstating
the pre-conflict subject position of the victims – the restoration of ‘ex ante state of
‘‘conjugal’’ equality and harmony’ (Acorn, 2004, p. 72)).2
Within the vista of this dual signification of restitution as a kind of return – of a
thing to a person and of a person to a (physical and imaginary) place – restitutive
justice, in the humanitarian discourse of responding to violent expropriation,
remains coupled with political fantasies of undoing, or reversing, the effects of
violence on the impacted communities (cf. Torpey, 2006). The humanitarian
restitution-making is based on what Acorn calls ‘pillars of optimism’ concerning
the law’s ability to assuage the experience of loss by securing the survivors’ ‘well-
being, dignity and secure membership in community’ (Acorn, 2004, p. 46). The
proposed definition of ‘undoing’ draws from cultural psychoanalytic theory;
undoing is a defence mechanism where ‘the subject makes an attempt to cause past
thoughts, words, gestures or actions not to have occurred’ (Laplanche and Pontalis,
1973, p. 477, my emphasis).3 It should be noted that for Freud, and those post-
Freudians who have developed further the idea of undoing (Anna Freud, Otto
Fenichel, Ernest Jones, Ella Freeman Sharpe, Melanie Klein, and others), it made
sense to think of its defence mechanism in conjunction with the desire for
reversibility, or what I call ‘restitutive desire’.
The category of desire refers to a ‘state of attachment [in which] a cloud of
possibility is generated by the gap between an object’s specificity and the needs and
promises projected onto it’ (Berlant, 2012, p. 6). The required caveat is that my use
of the term ‘restitutive desire’ follows Didier Fassin’s idea of ‘humanitarian
sentiments’: ‘emotions that direct our attention to the suffering of others and make
us want to remedy them’ through the link between ‘affects [and] values’ and
between ‘sensitivity [and] altruism’ (Fassin, 2011, p. 1). Similarly, to how Käpylä
and Kennedy (2014, p. 255) describe the humanitarian governance of compassion, I
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see ‘restitutive desire’ as structuring ‘the encounter between the suffering object of
relief and the caring public’ through the ‘productive power [of the] socially
circulated and embodied narrative frames’ (in the case of restitution-making, the
narrative frame of return in the abovementioned dual sense). The importance of the
concept of ‘desire’, then, is that in contrast to sentiments or emotions, it potentially
highlights and problematizes the gap between, on the one hand, the lived
experiences of the survivors of dispossession, and, on the other, the therapeutic
ambitions and optimistic projections of contemporary humanitarian politics. The
survivors’ testimonies often emphasize the importance of recognizing what this
article idiomatizes as ‘unrectifiable loss’ (and what Max Pensky has called
Nichtwiedergutzumachende, ‘that which can never be made good again’; Vladimir
Jankélévich – the irrevocable; and Jacques Derrida – the unforgivable (Pensky,
2003; Jankélévich, 2005; Derrida, 2001)). To the extent that the humanitarian
politics sees the violence of dispossession and displacement as entirely rectifiable
and ‘undoable’, it thus runs the risk of silencing these important testimonial
insights, or relegating them to the sphere of survivor psychology, rather than
recognizing them as a constitutive limit, or a threshold,4 on the humanitarian
politics of suffering and precarity.
The context within which this article places both restitution’s rise to prominence
as a reparative legal tool in post-conflict contexts and the affective and discursive
significance of the ‘restitutive desire’ in international responses to violent
dispossession, is that of a changing nature of global humanitarianism. Using the
terminology of ‘new humanitarianism’ or, more emphatically, ‘humanitarianism
with a sovereign face’, critics of the contemporary humanitarian governance have
identified connections between, on the one hand, the rapid professionalization and
instrumentalization of the humanitarian field and, on the other, the rejection of
classical humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality for the sake of a
more interventionist and politically engaged paradigm (see e.g. Barnett, 2001;
Fassin, 2011; McCallin, 2013; Redfield, 2012). One of the markers of ‘new
humanitarianism’ is the increased overlap between the goals and policies of
humanitarianism and those of development aid and human rights, and – in the case
of restitution – of transitional justice (Williams, 2007, 2012). Restitution-making
evidences the cross-entanglement of the distinctive logics of transitional justice and
humanitarianism, whereby transitional justice pursues its goals within the platform
of humanitarian governance, and humanitarian actors reach beyond the protective
and remedial register of responses to dispossession by raising questions of
reparations and accountability.
There is also another way in which the questions of new humanitarianism form
the central context for the proposed critique and genealogy of restitution. In his
work of ‘moral history’ of the ‘humanitarian reason’, Didier Fassin argues that the
emergence of the late twentieth century humanitarian governance has to do with the
aim of population management in ‘situations of inequality, contexts of violence,
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and experiences of suffering’, which in turn marks the reconfiguration of the role of
compassion, and sentimentality in general, in the political arena (Fassin, 2011,
p. 5). This ‘new moral economy’ of humanitarianism, Fassin argues, has resulted in
the ‘proliferation of measures and initiatives designed to aid [diverse forms of
dispossession]’. However, by replacing the discourse of inequality and exploitation,
its vocabulary of suffering and precarity has, potentially, silenced those perspec-
tives on ‘humanitarian crises’ that locate their origins in practices of new liberalism
and market economy. I am interested in critiquing the ways in which contemporary
humanitarian restitution-making has been entangled in, and reaffirmed the value of,
liberal capitalist narratives of property relations, and where the question of loss and
dispossession has been coopted by the logic of calculability and measurability (cf.
Durrant, 2014). The figure of unrectifiable loss potentially resists the logic of the
capital, of property and of calculability by pointing to the persistence of what
remains incalculable and unrestitutable about dispossession; the persistence of that,
which one cannot make amends for; a threshold or a limit on the economy of
returns.
The first part of this article traces the genealogy of restitution to Émile
Durkheim’s writings on the reparative role of law in modern society. I show that
Durkheim’s dichotomies between repressive and restitutive law, and between
mechanic and organic solidarity, create the background understanding for the
dominant conception of restitution in contemporary humanitarianism (‘restitution-
as-undoing’). Second, I focus on restitution politics in Bosnia in 1990s and link the
Durkheimian logic of restitution-making to reparative and redressive discourses of
‘new humanitarianism’ in the Balkans. Third, I introduce Freud’s notion of
restitution as a reconstructive practice that affirms the subject’s ‘catastrophic loss of
the world’. I argue that while the Freudian perspective calls for reconstruction of
what had been damaged or lost, it offers a counter-Durkheimian ethos of
restitution-making. This ‘restitution-as-reconstruction’ calls for recognition of the
survivors’ accounts of irreparable loss as the reminder of the ‘irrevocable facticity
of having-done’ (Looney, 2015, p. 274). The restitution-as-reconstruction poten-
tially orients humanitarianism towards different restitutive ethics, and beyond
property as the defining marker of subject–object relations.

Modern Law and Organic Sociality: Durkheim’s Restitution-as-

Undoing

The genealogical account of humanitarian restitution-making draws on the

distinction between punitive law and restorative law introduced by modern
Western penology, criminology and legal sociology in the 19th century. A
particularly important place in that genealogy belongs to Émile Durkheim who, I
suggest, forges a conceptual and sociological link between restitution and the

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undoing fantasy as modern secular categories. Following Adam Smith’s The

Wealth of Nations, and those British and French socio-economic theorists who
explored the social consequences of the industrial revolution of the productive
systems, in The Division of Labor in Society (1984 [1897]) Durkheim sought to
explain social consequences of labor division and production in modern Europe.
His particular interest was the emergence of social relationships of interdependence
and complementarity under the conditions of modernity. The emergence of the idea
of restitution-as-undoing needs thus to be placed in the context of what Durkheim
argued were three key social consequences of the European labor division under
industrialization: social heterogeneity, modern forms of social solidarity and
Western individualism. Durkheim described the latter as the ‘cult of the individual’
and as ‘moral individualism’, by which he meant that Western modernity invested
individualism with sacral meanings – it was celebrated through diverse public
rituals of citizenship and belonging, which, Durkheim argued, in traditional
societies had been reserved for the religious domain (cf. Coleman and White,
2006). In Sociology and Philosophy Durkheim argued (1974 [1924]) that ‘[s]ociety
has consecrated the individual and made him pre-eminently worthy of respect
[which meant not the] weakening but a transformation of the social bonds’. It is
‘society that instituted [moral individualism] and made the man the god whose
servant it is’ (it should be noted, however, that for Durkheim the ‘cult of the
individual’ had a strong humanitarian undertone; its dogma was ‘not egoism but
sympathy for all that is human, a wider pity for all sufferings, for all human
miseries, a more ardent desire to combat and alleviate them, a greater thirst for
justice’ (Durkheim, 2013 [1898], p. 156; cf. Lukes, 2014)).
Preindustrial social formations, Durkheim argued, were characterized by a high
degree of social coherence due to shared ‘values, sentiments and norms’, which he
called la conscience collective (‘the collective conscience’), and which defined the
‘totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the [members] of the same society’
(Durkheim, 1984 [1897], pp. 73–79). The notion of the collective conscience was
conceived as ‘the major cement that binds people’ in traditional societies (Coser,
2014 [1984], p. xix). In turn, in industrialized societies characterized by advanced
labour differentiation, social cohesion derived from the relations of reciprocity and
interdependence between its members. As Coser points out, for Durkheim cohesion
in modern societies arose ‘spontaneously [from the] consensus between individual
actors who, [by the virtue of being] engaged in different roles and tasks, were
dependent on one another’ (Coser, 2014 [1984], pp. xv–xvi).
Durkheim’s dichotomous conceptualization of traditional and modern societies
evidences a strong trend in the 19th century positivist sociology and historiography,
in particular among the proponents of socio-cultural evolutionism, to attempt
descriptions of modernity through oppositional constructions of the modern/pre-
modern. In this sense, the Durkheimian binary of industrialized and pre-
industrialized societies bears resemblance to, for example, Henry Maine’s concepts
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of contract-based societies and status-based societies, or to Ferdinand Tönnies’s

dichotomous construct of Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft (Coser, 2014 [1984], p.
xv). However, in contrast to Maine and Tönnies, Durkheim’s theory of modern
social organization does not follow the narrative script of loss and lamentation of
the decline of social regulation and demise of social cohesion and solidarity.
Instead, Durkheim’s depiction of pre-modern sociality and its registers of
communal unity and shared understandings are distinctively unromantic (cf.
Lenhard, 2011). It is important for the contextualization of my argument, then, to
recognize that Durkheim develops his ideas about restitutive law within the
dichotomous framework of the modern/pre-modern not as a narrative of loss and
decline, but, rather, as a narrative of radical transformation and emergence.5 As
Coser argues, for Durkheim ‘it is not the decay of social solidarity … that marked
the transition from relatively simple to relatively complex societies … Rather there
emerged a new type of solidarity in the world of modernity once the relatively
simple societies of the past had given way to the complex world of an elaborate
division of labor’ (Coser, 2014 [1984], p. xvi).
Durkheim maps onto this binary discourse of preindustrial and industrial
societies a distinction between two different operations of law: repressive and
restitutive (1984 [1897], pp. 68–69).6 The repressive modality of law, Durkheim
argues, is encapsulated in the workings of penal law and dominates in traditional
societies; the restitutive modality of law is characteristic of modern societies and is
expressed by civil, commercial and administrative law (cf. Jones, 1986). Law is ‘a
rule of sanctioned conduct’, which varies in regard to the ‘gravity attributed to
precepts, the place [sanctions] hold in the public conscience, [and] the role they
play in society’ (Durkheim, 1984 [1897], p. 68). Repressive law demands that the
culprit undergoes some kind of loss; it makes ‘demands on his fortune’, Durkheim
argues (1984 [1897], p. 69), ‘or on his honour, or on his life, or on his liberty’. In
contrast, restitutive law institutes ‘the return of things as they were’ and aims at the
‘re-establishment of troubled relations to their normal state’ (1984 [1897], p. 69;
my emphases). As Coser puts it, the purpose of restitutive sanctions according to
Durkheim was the ‘righting of balance upset by … violation’ (Coser, 2014 [1984],
p. xvii). I argue that in this formulation of restitutive law as a return to a pre-conflict
state and relationality, Durkheim lays the groundwork for what Freudian
psychoanalysis later illuminates as a coupling of restitution and undoing, and
which becomes manifest in contemporary reparative politics through the articu-
lation of ‘restitutive desire’ in international law and in humanitarian practices. As I
suggest in the next section of this article, this distinctive inscription of justice as a
kind of return (‘of things to their rightful owners’ but also ‘of things as they were’)
comes to underwrite the dominant approach of humanitarian politics that seeks to
redress violent expropriation, and provides some explanation of the immense
difficulty that the field of transitional justice has had with including questions of
structural and distributive injustice.7
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For Durkheim, crime is ‘bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social
life’ and that as such it undermines and ruptures social coherence (2007 [1895],
p. 101). It ‘offends’ the conscience collective. As Lukes puts it, ‘[c]rime, in
Durkheim’s perspective, is deviant conduct that violates prevailing norms and
offends the conscience of the upright, provoking them to passionately felt punitive
reactions that are authoritatively enforced in the form of law’ (Lukes, 2014, p. xxxi,
emphasis in the original). For Durkheim, it is then through the mechanisms of
undoing that restitutive law re-establishes social coherence and modern kinds of
solidarity. The repressive law conditions the emergence a ‘negative’ kind of social
solidarity, or what Durkheim calls la solidarité mécanique (‘mechanical solidar-
ity’), by reinforcing collective values, norms and sentiments, and the restitutive law
gives rise to ‘positive’ kind of social solidarity – la solidarité organique (‘organic
solidarity’). While la solidarité mécanique, Durkheim argues, ‘harmonizes men’s
movement [so that] the individual conscience [becomes] scarcely distinguishable
from the conscience collective [and] collective authority [becomes] absolute’ (1984
[1897], pp. 170–172), la solidarité organique signifies a rather different formation
of cooperative associations among individuated societal members:
[The kind of] solidarity which the division of labor produces [la solidarité
organique] is possible only if each [person in society] has a sphere of action
which is peculiar to him; that is, a personality. It is necessary, then, that the
collective conscience leaves open a part of the individual conscience in order
that special functions may be established there, functions which it cannot
regulate. The more this region is extended, the stronger is the cohesion which
results from this solidarity (Durkheim, 1984 [1897], p. 172).
Subsequent feminist, Marxist and post-colonial critiques of Durkheim’s socio-
economic and socio-legal analyses have shown that Durkheim problematically
ascribed the emergence of modern society to what appears as essentially non-
violent processes of labour differentiation and individuation, thereby erasing its
historical connection to different forms of socio-economic dispossession, to
subjugation of women, or to colonial violence and exploitation. Insofar as the
conceptualization of restitution-as-undoing remains indebted to such ideologically
invested sociological analyses, its dominant place in the international human rights
law and in humanitarian politics redressing unjust enrichment, risks replicating
some of these problematic patterns of thinking. As I show in the next section,
Durkheim’s notion of restitution as a ‘return of things as they were’ resonates
strongly with the international humanitarian project of post-conflict society
building.8 What interests me specifically given this article’s ambition to critique
the dominant conception of restitution and the logic of ‘restitutive desire’ in the
global politics of humanitarian redress, is how the Durkheimian understanding of
dispossession as that which is fully rectifiable and resolvable and of restitutive
justice as that which reverses social effects of violence become integral to
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international interventions aimed at undoing the effects of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and at

the re-establishment of multicultural federalism in Bosnia. The centrality of the
concept of restitution-as-undoing in the humanitarian restitution-making and in the
building of post-conflict sociality means that it potentially eradicates the space
where claims of unrectifiability can be articulated, as well as that it pacifies
mournful and vengeful affects by seeking to bring closure and resolution to
traumatic loss.

Undoing Ethnic Cleansing: The Bosnian Example of Restitution-

Making

It is important to contextualize the increased importance of humanitarian restitution

within the current trends in redressing population displacement during mass
conflict, as well as of the global politics of asylum-seeking and forced migration
(cf. Chimni, 2004). The developments in the refugee protection regime since 1990s
(and perhaps earlier) have brought about the support for the option of the
repatriation of refugees and displaced persons, and diminished support for the
options of local integration or third-country resettlement (Butt, 2009; Smit, 2012;
Unruth and Rhodri, 2013; Williams, 2007). Chimni (2004, p. 58) links the
international preference for the repatriation option to ‘the exilic bias of
international law’ due to a complex amalgam of socio-economic and political
factors that have consolidated into what some have termed politics of inhospitality
towards asylum-seekers and refugees. As Cordial and Røsandhaug suggest, it was
first in response to the ethnic conflicts in 1990s that restitutive programmes were
developed in order to assist repatriation of refugees and displaced persons (2009,
p. 2, n. 8). Liberal analysts of the humanitarian restitution-making have emphasized
the attempts at decoupling restitution from the politics of repatriation (see e.g.
McCallin, 2012). More critically oriented analysts, however, have focused on the
connection between, on the one hand, the implementation of restitutive pro-
grammes in fragile post-conflict states, and, on the other hand, the attempts within
UNHCR since 1990s to circumvent the principles of voluntarism by developing a
counter-principle of a ‘safe return’ (or ‘imposed return’), where the standard for
repatriation would be that of ‘adequate safety’, rather than elimination of the threat
of persecution per se (see Hathaway, 1997; Long, 2013). An important context for
contemporary restitution-making has then been the shift within the UNHCR
refugee protection platform from the discourse of ‘permanent solutions’ to that of
‘durable solutions’ (cf. Barnett 2001; Hassine and Leckie, 2015).9
This section exemplifies how Durkheim’s notion of restitutive law and modern
sociality becomes operative in humanitarian practices of restitution. Focusing on
the case of reparations after the Bosnian war (1992–1995), I argue that in the
Balkans the Durkheimian coupling of restitutive law and undoing has underwritten

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a particular idea of humanitarian interventionism whereby the intended social

effect of restitution-making was a kind of reversal (or undoing) of the aftermaths of
‘ethnic cleansing’. I also show that the ‘restitutive desire’ at work in the
humanitarian responses to wartime dispossession and displacement in Bosnia was
shaped by an understanding of the harm and loss suffered by the civilian
populations during the conflict of that which is entirely reparable and recoverable,
and that it whereby contributed to the elimination of the space for thinking, within
the vistas of reparative politics, about loss that is incalculable and unrectifiable.
The Bosnian case of post-war restitution-making has been recognized as a
watershed for the humanitarian project of ‘reversing acts of ethnic cleansing and
other attempts at altering the demographic nature of given nations’ (Leckie and
Huggins, 2011, p. 122). The humanitarian restitution in Bosnia and Herzegovina
was initiated by Annex 7 of the Dayton Accords and was managed by the
internationally supervised Commission for Real Property Claims (see Leckie and
Huggins, 2011; Walasek, 2015). As such, the restitutions were meant to undo the
effects of what became perceived as the driving forces behind the conflict in the
former Yugoslavia: the ‘sudden’ eruption of militant ethnic nationalism, ressen-
timent and the phantasmic pursuit of the culturally homogenous nation-state. As
Williams points out, the wars of Yugoslav dissolution were ‘characterized from the
beginning by attacks on civilian populations with the goal of creating ethnically
pure territorial enclaves’ (Williams, 2007, p. 33). Violent dispossession and unjust
enrichment were seen by the aggressors as crucial for the elimination of multiethnic
federalism, for the task of ethno-exclusivist redrawing of state boundaries and for
the expulsion of diasporic populations. In the years 1992–1995, more than half of
the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2.2 million) was driven out from their
homes due to ‘physical destruction and devastation of their property …, movement
into safer areas, economic needs for the sustainability of families … and … due to
life threats’ (Simanic, 2006; see also Philpott, 2005, pp. 2–3). Half of those forced
to migrate sought a refugee status outside of Yugoslavia; the remaining populations
either fled to other Yugoslav republics or remained displaced within Bosnian–
Herzegovinian municipalities. Abandoned villages were often destroyed and
abandoned urban residences were allocated to co-religionist populations. During
the 3 years of the war ‘more than half of the housing stock in Bosnia [was]
abandoned by its pre-conflict residents, with about one-third damaged or destroyed
and the rest re-allocated to other users’ (Williams, 2007, p. 34; see also Walasek,
2015).
In November 1992, the UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali established
the Commission of Experts pursuant to Security Council resolution 780. Its
mandate was to examine and analyse material concerning breaches of the Geneva
Conventions and violations of the international humanitarian law in the Bosnian
war. Final Report of the Commission of Experts documents and discusses the
crimes of ‘ethnic cleansing’,10 which includes damage to cultural property and
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different tactics of violent expropriation and dispossession of civilian populations.

While the report did not concern itself with questions of restitution per se, I suggest
that it did pave the path for its subsequent endorsement and its very specific
articulation in the Dayton Accords, where restitution became synonymous with the
undoing of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Final Report defined the destruction of cultural and
religious buildings and artefacts and the appropriation of possessions and domestic
spaces as integral to the logic of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (rather than seeing
dispossession and material destruction as subsidiary and extraneous to ethnic
cleansing). It should be noted, too, that in taking this approach to wartime
expropriation and material destruction, Final Report followed here the precedent
set by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which, focusing
specifically on the Nazi treatment of Jewish property, saw expropriation and
destruction of cultural and religious objects as integral to the pursued ‘program of
[population] extermination [and] one if its objectives’, and whereby as ‘crimes
against humanity’ (Final Report, 1994, p. 22).
What is significant, then, for my argument about the Durkheimian conception of
restitution-as-undoing operative in the humanitarian restitution-making in Bosnia,
is that Final Report has constructed a discursive nexus of three elements
constitutive of the crimes of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (the ethno-exclusivist idea of the
nation, population expulsions and material dispossession and destruction), and that
it depicted them as organically connected and mutually reinforcing. In Bosnia, the
international security nexus of ethnic exclusivism, population displacement and
material dispossession have come to constitute, I argue, the discursive framework
within which humanitarian restitution acquired prominence as a remedy for
wartime expropriation insofar as it gave rise to a counter-construction, or a counter-
discourse: the nexus of restitution, repatriation and the normative ideal of post-
conflict liberal sociality (bound, in Durkheimian terms, by ‘organic’ solidarity).
Following Final Report, Annex 7 of the Dayton Accords obliged the parties of the
agreement, namely the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Federation of
Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Republika Srpska, to follow the UNHCR repatriation
plan,11 and to restore the refugees’ and the displaced persons’ ‘property of which
they were deprived in the course of hostilities since 1991 and to be compensated for
any property that cannot be restored to them’ (Article 1.1).
I have argued so far that for Durkheim restitutive law marks ‘the return of things
as they were’ and that it seeks to ‘re-establish … troubled relations to their normal
state’ (Durkheim, 1984 [1897], p. 69). In this section, I have suggested that the
‘restitutive desire’ for not only staging the return of (material) things to their pre-
conflict owners, but also for the return of ‘things as they were’ (a return to the
situation of ethnic diversity, multicultural federalism and diasporic populations)
has been at work in the international humanitarian response to the Bosnian war and
the goal of reversing the effects of the ‘ethnic cleansing’. Just as Durkheim presents
harm and dispossession as that which is fully rectifiable, so does the humanitarian
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‘restitutive desire’ for undoing the effects of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia leave no
space for the articulation of the unrectifiable. In the next section, I turn to Freudian
psychoanalytic theory (a) to suggest why the idea of the humanitarian desire for
‘return’ and ‘undoing’ is politically suspect and (b) to offer a speculative account of
an alternative approach to restitution, which I provisionally term restitution-as-
reconstruction, and which is based on radically different understanding of the
relationship between the trauma of loss and dispossession and humanitarianism.

Beyond Undoing: Freud’s Restitution-as-Reconstruction

The conclusion from my analysis of both Durkheim’s sociological account of

restitution and undoing as the mechanisms for reversing the ‘social pathologies’ of
crime and of how humanitarian restitution-making was positioned in the politics of
redressing violence and mass dispossession in the Balkans during the 1990s,
expressing a desire for reversing the social effects of ‘ethnic cleansing’ through the
construction of modern (‘organic’) sociality, is that contemporary humanitarianism
is in a need of a more complex and more victim-centred understanding of
dispossession and loss as not always and not fully corrigible, recoverable, and/or
rectifiable. In this section, I look more closely at the idea of restitution in the
writings of Sigmund Freud and propose that Freud’s conception of ‘restitutive
striving’ (which I will call ‘restitution-as-reconstruction’) offers an alternative to
the Durkheimian idea of restitution-as-undoing insofar as it potentially opens
humanitarianism to more profound and more radical understandings of loss. I
propose that if the humanitarian restitutive politics is to generate any radically
transformative energies, it needs to come to grips with the concept of loss and
dispossession as that which, to an extent, resists restorative political efforts, and
remains, not only in material and psychological sense, but also in an ethical sense, a
marker of the unrecoverable.
It is, first, important to note that, in contrast to Durkheim, for Freud ‘restitution’
and ‘undoing’ are unrelated concepts and that they come to stand for different
psychic phenomena. As I have suggested in the introduction, in the cultural theory
of psychoanalysis ‘undoing’ stands for common individual or collective magical
procedures, enacted as part of obsessional neurotic behaviour, that aim at causing
the past not to have occurred. In Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,
analysing the case of obsessional neurosis of Paul Lorenz (the Rat Man), Freud
situates undoing alongside other defence mechanisms (including rationalization,
doubt and displacement) as expressive of a love–hate conflict, and defines it as the
interplay between ‘compulsive acts [which occur] in two successive stages, of
which the second one neutralizes the first’ (Freud, 2001 [1909], p. 192). For the Rat
Man, these impulses oscillated between love and hate for his fiancée, Gisela, and
between the acceptance of his father’s death and the desire to ‘undo’ his death.

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Freud illustrates the operations of undoing in the Rat Man’s relationship with
Gisela through the ‘stone incident’: the Rat Man removed a stone from a road on
which the fiancée’s carriage was later coming so that her carriage would not
overturn and she would not be harmed (a deed motivated by love), but felt then
immediately ‘obliged to go back and replace the stone in its original position’ (a
deed motivated by aggression). Freud argued that ‘undoing this deed of love by
replacing the stone where … her carriage might come to grief against it … was
determined by a motive contrary to that which produced the first part’ (Freud, 2001
[1909], p. 192). What is important, then, in understanding undoing as underpinned
by an ambivalence of feeling, or, Freud says, by ‘[a] battle between love and hate
[against] one and the same person’, is to envision the act of undoing (here, the
return of the removed stone) not merely as ‘a critical repudiation of a pathological
action’ – its correction or, as Durkheim would have it, ‘re-establishment of troubled
relations to their normal state’ (1984 [1897], p. 69) – but, rather, as itself ‘a part of
the pathological action, though a part which was determined by a motive contrary
to that which produced the first part’ (Freud, 2001 [1909], p. 192; cf. Sherwood,
2013 [1969], pp. 112–118).
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1990 [1926]), Freud uses the term
Ungeschehenmachen (literally, ‘to make un-happen’) to describe the mechanism of
undoing. Ungeschehenmachen defines ritualized forms of behaviour in obsessional
neurosis, where negative magical procedures are enacted to render selected acts or
events ‘null or void’ of affect through the staging of counter-acts or counter-events
(cf. Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 477). The Freudian language is helpful, then,
in illuminating the affective dynamics of humanitarian restitution in its dominant
form (what I have called restitution-as-undoing) as the staging of ‘counter-acts’ or
‘counter-events’ to wartime dispossession in that their intended political effects, as
the Bosnian case suggests is the reversal of harm suffered by the survivors.
Laplanche and Pontalis further argue that the defence mechanism of undoing needs
to be recognized as ‘directed at the act’s very reality, … the aim is to suppress it
absolutely, as though time were reversible’, rather than merely withdraw cathexis
and/or produce anticathexis (1973, p. 478; my emphasis). The importance of the
Freudian perspective is that it provides critical conceptual tools to speculate further
about the ‘restitutive desire’ accompanying and underwriting restitution as a
‘counter-act’ to dispossession as that of rendering the affects of dispossession
(mourning, resentment, anger, shame, rage and other) ‘null or void’, or, in other
words, of pacifying and depoliticizing them by declaring the injustice and harm
caused by dispossession settled. I am interested in sketching out a different
approach to restitution (restitution-as-reconstruction) by placing at the heart of the
restitutive politics the question of the unrectifiable. The aim is to consider such
politics of restitution that do not suppress or tranquilize these mournful and/or
vengeful affects, but declare them to be central to the post-conflict calls for justice
and reparation.
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The insights from the cultural psychoanalytic theory for generating alternative
approaches to restitution is that, in contrast to Durkheim, Freud regards restitution
and Ungeschehenmachen as both diagnostically and conceptually separate. Freud
uses the restitutive vocabulary to describe a reconstructive mechanism of
reattachment in his psychosexual theory of paranoia, i.e. the process of
reinvestment of libidinal energy into object representations. Restitution had no
connotations of reversibility fantasy, but, as Moore and Fine argue, it describes a
‘hypothetical psychic process by which psychotic patients attempt to recapture
reality after they have severed themselves from it’ (Moore and Fine, 1990, p. 169).
In Psychoanalytic Comments on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia, Freud discusses ‘restitutive striving’ in relation to the case of dementia
praecox suffered by Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge and a politician, as ‘an
attempt at recovery [and] a process of reconstruction’ (Freud, 2001 [1911], p. 71).
Freud never treated Schreber in person, but based his analysis on Schreber’s
autobiographical account of his psychotic breakdown in Memoirs of My Nervous
Illness (2000 [1903]). What is widely known about Freud’s interpretation of
Schreber’s case is that Freud located the origins of Schreber’s paranoia in his
repression of the homosexual desire. Freud proposes that for Schreber the
unacceptable and unbearable wish-fantasy ‘I love him’ is subject to a process of
reversal (‘I hate him’) and, then, of projection (‘I hate him because he persecutes
me’). The sublimated homosexual desire regresses into narcissism and into a
persecutory imagination; as Freud argues, ‘paranoics have brought along with them
a fixation at the stage of narcissism’ (2001 [1911], p. 72).
What is less known about Freud’s reading of Schreber’s memoirs is that it is in
Psychoanalytic Comments on an Autobiographical Account that Freud has offered
the most developed account of the restitutive mechanism in the context of loss and
psychic dispossession. Freud suggests that Schreber’s paranoia unfolded in three
consecutive stages, or, as Moore and Fine put it, three ‘schizophrenic events’,
including a break with reality as ‘object libido is defensively decathected’;
hypochondriasis as ‘object libido is transformed into narcissistic libido’ and an
attempt at, or strive for, restitution – the ‘recathexis of object representations’
(Moore and Fine, 1990, p. 169). In the first two stages, there is ‘detachment of
libidinal energies from their investment in representation of objects’, followed by
their redirection towards ‘investments in representations of the self’ (Arlow and
Brenner, 1969, p. 9).
What Freud finds particularly noteworthy in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness are
Schreber’s apocalyptic visions. Freud uses Schreber’s metaphorical phrases of the
‘end of the world’ to approximate the process of cathectic withdrawal as a retreat
of love of the world. For Freud, Schreber’s apocalyptic visions, then, are
‘projection[s] of [his] internal catastrophe’ and of the ‘subjective world [going] to
pieces’ (Der Weltuntergang ist die Projektion dieser innerlichen Katastrophe;
seine subjective Welt untergegangen, seitdem er ihr seine Liebe entzogen hat),
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 Zolkos

(Freud, 2001[1911], p. 73). Within the framework of acknowledgment of the

catastrophic world alteration – or, put stronger, world eradication – which for Freud
was the defining mark of the schizophrenic experience of the decathexis of the
external world, restitution appears to stand for not an attempted undoing, or a
reparative procedure per se, but a re-construction (die Rekonstruktion) or re-
establishment of subject–object relations. The important insight from the Freudian
speculations about restitution for humanitarian politics of redress (in spite of the
limits of the ‘translatability’ of Freud’s discussion of Schreber’s case into political-
cultural terms) derives from the fact that at the very heart of this conceptualization
lies affirmation of the irreversibility of the catastrophic loss of the world. What is at
stake for the subject experiencing such profound loss, then, is not undoing, but what
could be theorized through the ethical rubric of survival in trauma theory – survival
as a ‘form of attention to that which has passed by …, an attentiveness … that is
not preservational but residual’ (Khalip and Collings, 2014). The Freudian insight
into restitutive dynamics as ‘reconstruction after catastrophe’ and as ‘the attempt at
[a] cure’ (der Heilungsversuch), attest to the subject’s ‘profound internal change’
(Freud, 2001 [1911], p. 71). Freud’s description of the ‘restitutive strive’, then,
serves as a starting point for the critique of the Durkheimian restitution-as-undoing
and for the search for an alternative approach to restitution in humanitarian
responses to loss and dispossession.
Importantly, the logic of Nichtwiedergutzumachende, ‘that which can never be
made good again’ (Pensky, 2003), which I suggest to be at work in the Freudian
conception of restitution, does not imply that restitutive strive (and restitutive
politics) should not be attempted. Rather, there is an important aporetic aspect in
the Freudian idea of ‘restitutive striving’, which means that while (complete and
final) restitution is impossible, for Freud the rebuilding or re-establishing of the
world is, in fact, imperative. In restitution, the schizophrenic ‘[counters] the work
of repression’ and ‘brings back the libido again onto the people [and things] it had
abandoned’, whereby he/she ‘has recaptured a relation, and often a very intense
one, to the people and things in the world’ (Freud, 2001 [1911], p. 71). The
restitutive striving, Freud argues, ‘succeeds to some extent, but never completely’
(Diese gelingt nach der Katastrophe mehr oder minder gut, niemals völlig; eine
‘tiefgreifende innere Veränderung’ nach den Worten Schrebers hat sich mit der
Welt vollzogen), (Freud, 2001 [1911], p. 71).
Otto Fenichel expands this point:
[The subject] regains something, but not all he wants; instead of the lost
object representations, he succeeds in recapturing only their ‘shadows’, that
is, the word representations; the loss of the object forces him to substitute the
word representations for the object representations …. (2014).
Drawing on the Freudian insights into the dynamics of restitution-making, I
suggest not merely that humanitarian restitution-making will remain partial and
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incomplete because it relies on the always already established understandings of

what constitutes a rectifiable loss within culturally and politically established
definitions of property and ownership (though that as well), but also, and more
importantly, that it potentially silences the way in which the dispossessed subject
experiences her/his loss as ‘catastrophic’ in the Freudian sense – i.e. as a
constitutive limit, or a threshold, of the restitutive ethics. Freud’s engagement with
the question of unrectifiability of loss situates the subject–object relations
differently than the Durkheimian restitution-as-undoing. The aporetic construction
of restitution of loss which is irreversible, and, in a way, unrestitutable, potentially
subverts the capitalist logic of calculability, reversibility and control, and thus
opens up a space for reflection about loss beyond property relations and economic
reasoning.

Conclusions

I have sketched a genealogy of restitution at the interstices of humanitarianism and

transitional justice, and have suggested that the current restitutive response to
dispossession and displacement remains heavily indebted to Durkheim’s normative
imaginary of modern sociality and the restitutive work of law to reverse, or undo,
the ‘social pathologies’ of crime. Psychoanalysis sheds important light onto this
genealogy by thematizing operations and mechanisms of undoing. It also suggests
an understanding of restitution that is not tied to fantasies of reversibility.
What is so problematic, then, about the Durkheimian articulation of restitution-
as-undoing as it is currently practiced in humanitarian law and redress? I have
suggested that from the perspective of the Freudian idea of Ungeschehenmachen
(‘making-un-happen’), restitution-as-undoing is indicative of particular construc-
tions of liberal post-conflict subjectivity and of survivorship, as well as of the
normative ideas about ownership, economic calculability and possession incorpo-
rated within the contemporary humanitarian governance. The ‘restitutive desire’
governing the humanitarian post-war subject formation of victims and survivors is
a desire to subdue and overcome historical trauma – in the words of Laplanche and
Pontalis, ‘to suppress it absolutely’ (1973, p. 478) – and to rectify the unrectifiable.
I have suggested that the humanitarian ‘restitutive desire’ runs the risk of
precluding the possibility of the emergence of recalcitrant or disobedient subject
positions of those survivors who narrate their traumatic experiences of disposses-
sion and displacement as something ‘unmastered’ and never quite appeased by
restitutive measures and by repatriation opportunities, and hence as potentially
resistant to the discursive framework of capitalist property relations. Furthermore,
the psychoanalytic insights into Ungeschehenmachen suggest that restitution-as-
undoing marks, possibly, a politically suspicious practice of rendering violence and
trauma of dispossession ‘null and void’ of mournful, resentful and/or rageful affects

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 Zolkos

that have been brought about by the experience of loss and dispossession. These
affects have a central place in the attempts at radicalization of the post-conflict
politics of justice and reparative demands, as well as in the formation of survivor
solidarities and communities. The importance of making place for unrectifiable loss
within the humanitarian politics of restitution and reparation is thus that it signifies
not merely a failure or an error in the implementation or execution of restitution-
making (though that is at times the case), but, rather, that it marks a constitutive
limit, or a threshold, for politics and for law in their encounter with situations of
trauma, mourning and dispossession.
Finally, in regard to the context of my inquiry, namely the emergence of new
kinds of humanitarianism and the departure from classic forms of the humanitarian
ethos, my analysis raises the question about the possibility of a different kind of
restitution – one that does not contribute to the de-radicalization and de-
politicization of the survivors’ subject positions, and that does not seek to
overcome and subdue trauma of dispossession, but that critiques humanitarianism
as a moral discourse of response to injustice, mass expulsion, expropriation and
marginalization. By reorienting the restitutive imaginary towards the frontiers and
impasses of its political productions through the idea of unrectifiable and
incalculable loss, I have not only sought to counter the Durkheimian notion of
‘the return of things as they were’ with the Freudian striving to ‘recapture the
‘‘shadows’’’ of the lost world’, but have also gestured at the horizon of
humanitarianism as the ethics of the inadequacy of response. Such ethics is not
just about the recognition of the political limits on the humanitarian mandate and
practice. It is also about recognizing the constitutive incapacity of the self to
respond – fully, successfully, adequately, but always only ‘as if’ and incompletely
– to the other’s loss and suffering. To let humanitarianism be haunted by this
inadequacy of response is to trouble the assumptions of calculability of return and
of economic reasoning.
In the opening paragraphs of this article, I wrote about two meanings of ‘return’,
which overlap within the discourses of humanitarian restitution-making (the return
of seized possessions and the return to the previous situation or circumstance) – in
the first sense, the survivors and victims of dispossession have their possessions
returned to them; in the second sense, they are themselves being returned to a prior
condition or a place. My attempt to theorize restitution beyond the logic of undoing
and calculability through the Freudian idiom of ‘restitutive strive’ suggests another
meaning of ‘return’. Neither a reappropriation nor a reversion, this different kind of
‘return’ signifies loss as that which revisits, or haunts, persistently, the site of
dispossession, without the possibility of pacification or amends. Here, recognizing
loss as never quite rectifiable means the possibility of ‘being touched or suffused by
something that one cannot quite recall, feeling the importance of something that
one has laid aside or tried to forget’ (Brown, 2001, p. 153). It is loss that ‘has to do
with belonging but not with ownership’ (Durrant, 2014, p. 107). Such loss troubles
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the binary logic of humanitarianism that allocates the site of suffering and that of
the possibility of its alleviation and resolution to two different and incompatible
subject positions. This troubling and this incalculability are, it seems to me, a good
and necessary place to start rethinking the ‘new’ in ‘new humanitarianism’.

About the Author

Magdalena Zolkos is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice at
the Australian Catholic University. She is the author of Reconciling Community
and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorising (Continuum, 2010)
and the editor of On Jean Amery: Philosophy of Catastrophe (Lexington, 2011).
She is currently working on a book dealing with restitutive humanitarianism and
irreparable loss.

Notes

1 There is a vast literature on restitution both as a humanitarian response to dispossession during

conflict, and as the legal principle for the rectification of unjust enrichment. See Ballard, 2010;
Barkan, 2000; Butt, 2009; Cordial and Røsandhaug, 2009; de Greiff, 2006; McCallin, 2012;
Williams, 2007, 2012. For texts that consider restitution in the context of transitional and reparative
justice, see Bass, 2012; du Plessis and Peté, 2007; Laplante, 2013; Walker, 2006, 2015.
2 This points to an overlap between humanitarian restitution and restorative justice. The restitutive
desire (to cause past violence not to have occurred) has been taken up by critical scholars of
restorative justice in regard to the problematic assumption of organic wholeness of pre-conflict
communities (Pavlich, 2013 [2005]), and in regard to critiquing the idea of violence as a singular
event of shattering or trauma – ‘an ex nihilo disruption in an otherwise harmonious state of affairs’
(Thomason, 2015, p. 74). Working within the field of reparative justice, Margaret Urban Walker
offers a slightly different critical trajectory of the position that she terms ‘the impossibility argument’
on post-traumatic reparation, i.e. that ‘justice in repair consists in cancelling out or reversing
wrongful harms’ (Walker, 2015, p. 211). Walker then proposes an approach to reparative justice as
‘not restoring a status quo ante but affirming a new baseline for moral and political engagement
going forward’ (Walker, 2015, p. 217). While I am also interested in critiquing the humanitarian
restitution-making as simply an expression of corrective justice, and in articulating alternative
restitutive imaginaries and restitutive politics, I think that the desire to undo or reverse violence
should be thought as an aporetic desire, rather than, as Walker does, as reductio arguments (see
Zolkos, 2011).
3 While this article draws on psychoanalytic theory to conceptualize undoing and restitution, it is not
my intention to ‘project an anthropomorphic persona’ onto states (or onto non-states, such as
humanitarian NGOs). Rather, my own epistemic and theoretical orientation to psychoanalysis is as a
cultural theory that seeks not to psychologize or anthropomorphize socio-cultural phenomena, but,
rather, that, through its emphasis on the relationship between the social and the psychic (and
especially the unconscious), is uniquely equipped to illuminate affective and relational ‘undercur-
rents’ of cultural hierarchies, power relations, social norms and vulnerability, as well as to present
psychological forces (such as love, hate, desire, enjoyment, etc.) as socially articulated and
experienced.
4 The meaning of the notion of a ‘threshold’ in this article is indebted to the philosophy of Giorgio
Agamben, for whom threshold indicates not simply the existence of a limit or a verge, but ‘the

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experience of the limit itself’ (1993, p. 66). As such, for Agamben ‘threshold’ marks, for instance,
the space of the operation of law and its exteriority – its radical outside, or a juridical void. Here, the
focus is on the exteriority to/of the logic of reversibility and return, which I posit to be at the heart of
humanitarian restitution.
5 It is important to note here both the influence of evolutionary biology on Durkheim’s sociological
theory of modern society (cf. Coser, 2014[1984]); Lukes, 2014), and the appropriateness of Charles
Taylor’s term ‘subtraction theory’ for Durkheim’s view on transformation from social organization
based on kinship and communal homogeneity to social cohesion rooted in labour differentiation and
individualism (Taylor, 2007). For Durkheim, the story of that transformation (as a story of the
emergence of the modern subject) is not at all that of loss of a worldview and a life world, or of a
certain impoverishment of the subject in terms of what is possible for him/her to think, practice or
feel under the social conditions of secular modernity. Rather, for Durkheim, it is a story of an
unquestioned progress, of advancement to a higher level of social development, and of an
achievement of freedom. For example, Durkheim argues that ‘restitutive sanctions protect the
differentiation of society in specialized functions, in sub-groups, in individualized personal activities.
Restitutive law guarantees the free division of social [labour], of which it is itself an effect: it is
associated with a more flexible collective ideal, which admits of its particularization’ (1984 [1897]).
6 Durkheim’s binary association of repressive sanctions with traditional societies and of restitutive
sanctions with modern Western societies has been subject to extensive critique as regards
sociological and anthropological insights into the prevalence of restitutive measures, reconciliatory
group rituals and reciprocal obligations in non-Western societies (Coser, 2014 [1984], p. xxiii).
7 For the critique of the corrective (Aristotelian) paradigm in transitional justice, see Laplante, 2013;
Moffett, 2016. For the attempts at making transitional justice responsive to structural, reparative and
distributive concerns, see Selim and Murithi, 2011; Thomason, 2015; Walker, 2015.
8 A point that I cannot develop in the article is that while the stated ambition of the humanitarian
restitution-making is to reverse the social effects of unjust enrichment, thereby suggesting a
relatively non-invasive and non-interfering process of rectifying (in Durkheimian terms) the social
pathologies of the crimes of dispossession, my proposed reading of Durkheim suggests that it is a
particular (‘organic’) kind of society that is being built, while other alternative ways of thinking
about, and practicing, restitution are being foreclosed. Humanitarian restitution-as-undoing tends to
be viewed as a non-violent practice; however, it should rather be seen as part and parcel of a more
politically engaged, interventionist model of ‘new’ humanitarianism.
9 Coles argues that ‘[the concept of] ‘durable solutions’ amounted effectively to a devaluation of the
post-war notion of solution in relation to external settlement, i.e. naturalization, in favour of a new
concept falling short of naturalization, but including economic self-sufficiency, in the evident hope
that this devaluation of the concept of solution – principally … at the expense of the refugee – would
induce the first receiving countries with an additional encouragement of international aid, to keep the
refugees within their territories …. [T]he concept of durable solution seems to have been scarcely
evaluated at all from a legal protection perspective, as if it were a purely economic concept’ (Coles,
1990).
10 ‘Ethnic cleansing’ has no legal definition, and that it was introduced in the context of the Bosnian
war as a euphemisms of the ‘final solution’ (to the ‘problem’ of Yugoslav multicultural federalism)
as a means of identifying a singular unifying logic behind diverse political and military tactics for
population deportation in Bosnia. Final Report of the Commission of Experts (1994, pp. 33–34)
defined ‘ethnic cleansing’ as a process of ‘rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or
intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area’, which included the tactics of
‘destruction of personal, public and cultural property; looting, theft and robbery of personal property;
forced expropriation of real property; [and] forceful displacement of civilian population’.

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11 For details, see UNHCR Presents Bosnia Repatriation Plans (17 January 1996), as well as
discussions of Bosnia in Barkan, 2000; Ferstman and Rosenberg, 2009; Leckie and Huggins, 2011;
Philpott, 2005; Smit, 2012; Williams, 2007.

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