For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization ...to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors' places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.
As the site of the assassination that triggered World War I and the place where the term "ethnic cleansing" was invented during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Bosnia has become a global symbol of ...nationalist conflict and ethnic division. But as Edin Hajdarpasic shows, formative contestations over the region began well before 1914, emerging with the rise of new nineteenth-century forces-Serbian and Croatian nationalisms as well as Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim, and Yugoslav political movements-that claimed this province as their own.Whose Bosnia?reveals the political pressures and moral arguments that made this land a prime target of escalating nationalist activity.
To explain the remarkable proliferation of national movements since the nineteenth century, Hajdarpasic draws on a vast range of sources-records of secret societies, imperial surveillance files, poetry, paintings, personal correspondences-spanning Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, and Austria. Challenging conventional readings of Balkan histories,Whose Bosnia?provides new insight into central themes of modern politics, illuminating core subjects like "the people," state-building, and national suffering. Hajdarpasic uses South Slavic debates over Bosnian Muslim identity to propose a new figure in the history of nationalism: the(br)other, a character signifying at the same time the potential of being both "brother" and "Other," containing the fantasy of both complete assimilation and insurmountable difference. By bringing such figures into focus,Whose Bosnia?shows nationalism to be an immensely dynamic and open-ended force, one that eludes any clear sense of historical closure.
Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, ...abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows that the use of camps and detention facilities has been a ubiquitous practice in countless wars and genocides in order to achieve the wartime objectives of perpetrators. Although camps have been used for different strategic purposes, their essential functions are always the same: to inflict torture and lasting trauma on the victims. Torture, Humiliate, Kill develops the author’s collective traumatization theory, which contends that the concentration camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities had the primary purpose of inflicting collective trauma on the non-Serb population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This collective traumatization consisted of excessive use of torture, sexual abuse, humiliation, and killing. The physical and psychological suffering imposed by these methods were seen as a quick and efficient means to establish the Serb “living space.” Karčić argues that this trauma was deliberately intended to deter non-Serbs from ever returning to their pre-war homes. The book centers on multiple examples of experiences at concentration camps in four towns operated by Bosnian Serbs during the war: Prijedor, Bijeljina, Višegrad, and Bileća. Chosen according to their political and geographical position, Karčić demonstrates that these camps were used as tools for the ethno-religious genocidal campaign against non-Serbs. Torture, Humiliate, Kill is a thorough and definitive resource for understanding the function and operation of camps during the Bosnian genocide.
In November 2007 Adam Moore was conducting fieldwork in Mostar when the southern Bosnian city was rocked by two days of violent clashes between Croat and Bosniak youth. It was not the city's only ...experience of ethnic conflict in recent years. Indeed, Mostar's problems are often cited as emblematic of the failure of international efforts to overcome deep divisions that continue to stymie the postwar peace process in Bosnia. Yet not all of Bosnia has been plagued by such troubles. Mostar remains mired in distrust and division, but the Brcko District in the northeast corner of the country has become a model of what Bosnia could be. Its multiethnic institutions operate well compared to other municipalities, and are broadly supported by those who live there; it also boasts the only fully integrated school system in the country. What accounts for the striking divergence in postwar peacebuilding in these two towns?
Moore argues that a conjunction of four factors explains the contrast in outcomes in Mostar and Brcko: The design of political institutions, the sequencing of political and economic reforms, local and regional legacies from the war, and the practice and organization of international peacebuilding efforts in the two towns. Differences in the latter, in particular, have profoundly shaped relations between local political elites and international officials. Through a grounded analysis of localized peacebuilding dynamics in these two cities Moore generates a powerful argument concerning the need to rethink how peacebuilding is done-that is, a shift in the habitus or culture that governs international peacebuilding activities and priorities today.
Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world’s most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest ...feast of Elijah’s Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation—waiting to wait—becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time set between cosmology, nationalism, and embodied memories of proximity.
In 1992 David Owen was appointed the EU Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, working alongside the UN’s Co-Chairman, Cyrus Vance. The papers collected here provide ...fascinating primary source material and an insider’s account of the intense international political activity at that time, which culminated in the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP). At a time when the international community is looking again at whether and how the Dayton Accords and the 1995 division into two entities should be adjusted in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Owen highlights elements of the VOPP which are of continuing relevance and which can guide political debate and decisions in 2012 and thereafter. Sadly, Bosnia-Herzegovina is still deeply divided, a direct consequence of not imposing the VOPP. The book reminds the international community and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that a unified structure for their country is still achievable.
This book provides a profound insight into post-war Mostar, and the memories of three generations of this Bosnian-Herzegovinian city. Drawing on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, it offers a ...vivid account of how personal and collective memories are utterly intertwined, and how memories across the generations are reimagined and ‘rewritten’ following great socio-political change. Focusing on both Bosniak-dominated East Mostar and Croat-dominated West Mostar, it demonstrates that, even in this ethno-nationally divided city with its two divergent national historiographies, generation-specific experiences are crucial in how people ascribe meaning to past events.
Dieses Buch liefert einen einzigartigen Einblick in das Leben in der Stadt Mostar. Im Vordergrund stehen dabei die Erinnerungen der Menschen dieser seit dem Krieg in den 1990er-Jahren geteilten bosnisch-herzegowinischen Stadt. Basierend auf einer mehrjährigen ethnographischen Feldforschung untersucht die Autorin die tiefgreifende Verwobenheit persönlicher und kollektiver Erinnerungen anhand der Analyse dreier Generationen: Erstens die Aufbaugeneration Jugoslawiens, die „First Yugoslavs“, zweitens die „Last Yugoslavs“, die nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg geboren wurden und in Titos sozialistischem Jugoslawien sozialisiert wurden und drittens die „Post-Yugoslavs“, die nur noch den Zerfall Jugoslawiens und den Krieg als Kinder erlebten.
"Only unity saves the Serbs" is the famous call for unity in the Serb nationalist doctrine. But even though this doctrine was ideologically adhered to by most of the Serb leaders in Croatia and ...Bosnia, disunity characterized Serb politics during the Yugoslav disintegration and war. Nationalism was contested and nationalist claims to homogeneity did not reflect the reality of Serb politics. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Serb politics and challenges widespread assumptions regarding the Yugoslav conflict and war. It finds that although Slobodan Milosevic played a highly significant role, he was not always able to control the local Serb leaders. Moreover, it adds to the emerging evidence of the lack of importance of popular attitudes; hardline dominance was generally based on the control of economic and coercive resources rather than on elites successfully "playing the ethnic card." It moves beyond an assumption of automatic ethnic outbidding and thus contributes toward a better understanding of intra-ethnic rivalry in other cases such as Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, Nagorno-Karabakh and Rwanda.
The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and
economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue
to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their
...religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade
of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor
undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing
so shapes the present. In particular, Henig questions how
contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse
and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and
with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. His
observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and
historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious
convictions and conduct.
Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking
Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to
be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and
Herzegovina.
The fall of the United Nations 'safe area' of Srebrenica in July 1995 to Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces stands out as the international community's most egregious failure to intervene during the ...Bosnian war. It led to genocide, forced displacement and a legacy of loss. But wartime inaction has since spurred numerous postwar attempts to address the atrocities' effects on Bosnian society and its diaspora. Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide reveals how interactions between local, national and international interventions - from refugee return and resettlement to commemorations, war crimes trials, immigration proceedings and election reform - have led to subtle, positive effects of social repair, despite persistent attempts at denial. Using an interdisciplinary approach, diverse research methods, and more than a decade of fieldwork in five countries, Lara J. Nettelfield and Sarah E. Wagner trace the genocide's reverberations in Bosnia and abroad. The findings of this study have implications for research on post-conflict societies around the world.
