Stjepan Meštrović

Stjepan Gabriel Meštrović (born 1955), is an American sociologist[1] and an expert in war crimes. He testified on the trials regarding Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse and at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.[2]

His book is The Good Soldier on Trial?, and published shortly before the work was Rules of Engagement? A Social Anatomy of an American War Crime--Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq. It follows The Trials of Abu Ghraib: An Expert Witness Account of Shame and Honor, and both books are accounts of the realities of the cases in which he served as an expert witness.[3]

Meštrović is a sociology professor at Texas A&M University and holds three degrees from Harvard University and a Ph.D. degree from Syracuse University.[2] He is a grandson of the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović.

His book, Postemotional Society, attempts to extend David Riesman's concept of other-directedness in The Lonely Crowd and apply it to contemporary social life, particularly the idea of fake sincerity. Genocide after Emotion (1996) is an anthology edited by him. It attempts to resolve the contrasts of social upheaval and warfare, confusions of histories and manipulations of reality by introducing a theoretical construct he calls 'postemotionalism', which he considers to be a more appropriate term than postmodernism to 'capture the fission, Balkanization, ethnic violence and other highly-emotional phenomena of the late 1990s'. The anthology contains a wide variety of interpretations and responses to the breakup of Yugoslavia, including a historical outline and analysis of the conflict through the Austro—Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, responses and representations by the American media, and psychoanalytical interpretations of Serb—Croat 'otherness'.