When one thinks of labs, they probably imagine a room filled with beakers, Bunsen burners, and people wearing lab coats. While this is the reality of labs for many STEM majors, for students in the humanities and social sciences, the whole world can be a laboratory.
“From a social science perspective, we call study abroad experiences our laboratories,” says Trinity University Political Science Professor Rosa Aloisi, Ph.D.
One of these study abroad experiences is the International Criminal Justice program, run by Aloisi and Anthropology Professor Alfred Montoya, Ph.D. This two-week program builds on the political science course of the same name, which informs students about how global conflicts are addressed within the international criminal justice system.
Aloisi founded the program in 2015 to show students the impact of international criminal justice on postwar societies, not just through the pages of a textbook but through their own eyes. This summer, students in “International Criminal Justice” traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to experience the aftermath of the Bosnian War during the breakup of Yugoslavia, whose crimes were adjudicated by one of the international courts they spent the spring semester learning about, the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The remnants of war were visible from the moment the students touched down in Sarajevo, from buildings marred by the debris of shells, signs of the longest siege in the history of wars, and the changes to the natural landscape, to the visits of concentration camps in Prijedor. They visited a World War II memorial, hiked up mountains, reflected in cemeteries, and more.
“There is still a lot of cultural and social conflict within Bosnia and Herzegovina, and getting to see that firsthand, I really got a deeper understanding of the laws used in these situations,” says political science major Charlotte Geddes ’29.
Geddes took Aloisi’s class this past spring and says this study abroad experience allowed her to view the lessons she learned more analytically. As she explored the country over those two weeks, she realized that “legal resolution doesn't always mean resolution.”
As the students talked to survivors and victims of crimes and learned about the geography of the territory, they gained a better understanding of what it means to live in a country that has been ravaged by civil conflict and how communities that have fought each other for a long time are living together. Students who came to the country with a baseline knowledge of war crimes from their class saw how these crimes are actually perpetrated on the ground.
Still, the goal of the program is not for students to come away from this experience disheartened by the tragedies they witness, but rather for them to return to their everyday lives empowered “to ask how they can improve the international criminal justice system,” Aloisi says.
Through this program, Aloisi and Montoya are shaping aspiring forensic anthropologists, lawyers, and others passionate about addressing international criminal affairs. For anthropology and sociology majors, this program provides students with the necessary fieldwork experience for those very interested in working with victim communities, from both international and local perspectives. Political science majors gain experience engaging with international human rights and international criminal law.
“A lot of times with traumatic events, people can insert their own feelings into it. We need to not only do that and understand how we feel about these awful events, but also (we need to) learn how to analyze them in a productive way to understand how to move forward,” Geddes says. “(Aloisi and Montoya) really taught us how to break apart specific actions and understand them on a very high level.”