Section: News
New Book on Criminal Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Andy Aitchison, Lecturer in Social Policy, joins the Intersentia Series on Transitional Justice
Andy Aitchison's Making the Transition: International Intervention, State-Building and Criminal Justice Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina is published this month as the third volume in Intersentia's series on transitional justice.
In the book, Andy traces processes of reconstruction, reform and restructuring that have taken place since the end of the Bosnian war in 1995, setting this against a background of political developments in the country and exploring the interaction between international and domestic players. While many works focus on one element of the criminal justice system, Andy brings together police, courts and prisons in one volume and locates these in relation to the broader state-building activity that continues in Bosnia and Herzegovina to this day.
In a preface to the volume Dirk van Zyl Smit, Professor of Comparative and International Penal Law at the University of Nottingham, identifies Bosnia as "a sophisticated society in which a pre-existing criminal justice system with a clear set of values was confronted, after a major conflict, by a large and diverse international effort." He continues to note that, through thorough empirical research in the context of a single country study, Andy is able to explore a series of complex interactions that occurred in Bosnia and to highlight variations across the different elements of the country's fragmented criminal justice systems.
Michael Levi, Professor of Criminology at Cardiff University, and member of the Council of Europe Criminological and Scientific Council, endorsed the book saying, "this superb historically, politically and theoretically informed book should be read by all those with an interest in the challenges and pitfalls of efforts to reform policing, courts and prison processes."
Andy joined the School of Social and Political Science in 2006 and lectures on a number of topics related to criminal justice and comparative analysis. He directs, alongside James Chalmers of the School of Law, the MSc in Global Crime, Justice and Security, an innovative and interdisciplinary programme launched in 2009. He holds degrees from Edinburgh and Cardiff in Politics and Modern History and Criminology and a PhD in Social Science from Cardiff University.
Intersentia, based in Antwerp and Cambridge, specialise in publishing academic work on human rights, international law and European law.
This page was published on 2 April 2011