‘I Say, You Say’: Transitional Justice and Normative Polarisation in Parliamentary Interactions

Scholars have analysed how different actors in post-conflict societies support or resist reckoning with war crimes. Approaching opposed discourses as static construct, they have revealed transitional justice as a contested field of practice. But, they have overlooked how these actors engage with each other. Addressing this gap, we approach discourse as a dynamic construct and foreground an interactional dimension of political communication to evaluate its effect on transitional justice deliberation. We use an original dataset of speeches in the Serbian Parliament from 2003-2023. We identify how partisan and co-partisan interactions between MPs contribute to normative amplification of messages and political polarisation centred on transitional justice. The paper demonstrates how a computational analysis of discourse patterns advances the evidence base for normative claims about transitional justice, while shifting attention to little understood role of parliamentary debates in shaping views on transitional justice.