Uncomfortable Evidence: On the Challenge of Telling New Stories about Srebrenica
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has sculpted the story of July 1995 in Srebrenica. In working to hold accountable the perpetrators of the crime of genocide, among other crimes against humanity, the ICTY’s prosecutors gathered an immense amount of evidence, presented cases in the courtroom, and obtained numerous convictions. These legal proceedings have engendered bitter, ongoing disputes among various actors in Bosnia–Herzegovina over their validity. All these dynamics have affected how historians approach this history. In general, they have not posed questions that stray far from the objectives that are firmly tied to the ICTY’s genocide narrative, with its clear categories of perpetrators and victims, and objective of establishing the guilt of the former and the victimization of the latter. Nearly thirty years since July 1995, perhaps the time has come to ask: what can we learn from this approach that is new? Rather than retelling what we already know about these events, we might consider turning our analytical gaze toward what is called here, “uncomfortable evidence.” This is a shorthand for stories about July 1995 that resist our desire to domesticate them into binary categories of black and white, which are more relevant for legal proceedings, and those who seek to use history to affirm or deny their results. Instead, stories based on uncomfortable evidence – three of which are told and analysed here – invite us to enter a grey zone where we embrace the complexity of human behaviour and take up the challenge of accounting for it. In so doing, historians of Srebrenica can more effectively return to a primary challenge of their discipline: to explain this violent past, while resisting the urge to make sense of it with rigid categories based on their contemporary moral and political positions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.031 | 0.040 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.027 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".