Teaching Atrocity Criminology with ICTY Archives: Disciplinarity, Research, Ethics

This paper examines three aspects of an undergraduate course, Criminologies of Atrocity. The course uses the extensive volume of testimony and other evidence held in online archives at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and culminates in assessed individual research projects. After a description of the intellectual and institutional context of the course and an account of course delivery, the paper examines three dimensions of the course. First, the course successfully encourages a multi-disciplinary orientation among students in line with the historical development of criminology, the demands of studying atrocity, and identified pedagogical benefits. Second, the course is situated in relation to the research-teaching nexus, with pedagogical benefits around inclusion, democratization, and learning. Finally, literature on research ethics is applied to the teaching of the course. The paper supports the integration of publicly available archives into teaching which combines substantive and methodological dimensions of criminology.