The Genocide the Law Could Not See: Rethinking Intent Through the Intersubjective Destruction Framework

This dissertation argues that the destruction inflicted upon the Kosovar Albanian population between 1989 and 2001 exposes a critical structural limitation within international genocide law: its over-reliance on a physicalist understanding of harm. Contemporary jurisprudence continues to privilege kinetic violence and mass killing, rendering cultural, institutional, and relational harms legally peripheral. This "Physicalist Requirement" has produced a structural lacuna and a corresponding normative void, in which the dismantling of a group’s intersubjective world falls outside the evidentiary assessment of genocidal intent (dolus specialis).To address this gap, the dissertation develops the Intersubjective Destruction Framework (IDF), a multidisciplinary model that synthesizes sociological theories of "Social Death" with emerging scientific evidence on the biological transmission of trauma. Utilizing a Cumulative, Comparative, and Longitudinal Synthesis (CCLS), the study reinterprets the Serbian state project through three audited modalities of harm: Kinship Fragmentation, Cultural-Memory Annihilation, and Social-Cohesion Disabling.
The findings demonstrate that the administrative purges, language bans, and institutional closures of the 1990s were not merely preparatory or discriminatory acts, but constitutive elements of a genocidal process aimed at the group’s intersubjective foundation. This continuum of destruction transitioned from bureaucratic violence into wartime atrocities, including gender separations and sexual violence which culminated in post-conflict "concealment operations," such as mass-grave transfers and the strategic non-cooperation regarding the disappearance.
Taken together, these patterns provide a robust evidentiary basis for inferring genocidal intent, challenging dominant counterinsurgency narratives and exposing the limits of current legal paradigms. The dissertation concludes that integrating structural, cultural, and relational harms into the assessment of intent realigns genocide law with Raphael Lemkin’s holistic vision. Recognizing intersubjective harm is essential not only for documenting past atrocities like Kosova but for ensuring that future genocides executed through bureaucratic or institutional means do not remain legally invisible.