It has been 27 years since the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the history of the conflict, its consequences, and long-term implications for the politics and lives of its citizens has ...remained a source of interest for scholars across the globe and across disciplines. This scholarship has included works by historians and political scientists seeking to explain the war’s origins with a view to Bosnia’s traditional multi-ethnic character and background. The country has been used as a case study in state- and peace-building, as well as to study the implications of ongoing transitional justice processes. Other scholars within the fields of human rights and genocide studies have focused on documenting the war crimes committed against the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the conflict and the mass-scale displacement of people, mostly Bosnian Muslims, from their homes and homelands. International law scholars have carried this work further, tracing the development of courts created in response to war crimes in Bosnia and their effectiveness in generating justice for victims.
Diaspora communities have formed in North America (especially in St. Louis), Europe, and Australia because of war and displacement, and have themselves become a considerable topic of study spanning the disciplines of anthropology, migration studies, political science, memory studies, conflict and security studies, psychology, and geography.
This volume seeks to illuminate how Bosnian migrant and diaspora scholars are contributing to the development of Bosnian Studies. The authors included in this volume are either writing from their (new) home bases in Australia, Austria, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the
United States, among others, or they have returned to Bosnia after a period of migration. Their chapters have distinct entry points of inquiry, demonstrating how scholars have integrated Bosnia as a theme across the range of disciplines in which they are situated. The selections
included in the volume range from literary analysis to personal memoirs of the conflict, from studies of heritage and identity to political science analysis of diaspora voting, to genocide studies and questions of (or lack of) ethics in the growing field of Bosnian Studies.
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.
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.
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.
This social, cultural, and political history of Slavic Muslim women of the Yugoslav region in the first decades of the post-Ottoman era is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues ...confronting these women. It is based on a study of voluntary associations (philanthropic, cultural, Islamic-traditionalist, and feminist) of the period. It is broadly held that Muslim women were silent and relegated to a purely private space until 1945, when the communist state “unveiled” and “liberated” them from the top down. After systematic archival research in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and Austria, Fabio Giomi challenges this view by showing: How different sectors of the Yugoslav elite through association publications, imagined the role of Muslim women in post-Ottoman times, and how Muslim women took part in the construction or the contestation of these narratives. How associations employed different means in order to forge a generation of “New Muslim Women” able to cope with the post-Ottoman political and social circumstances. And how Muslim women used the tools provided by the associations in order to pursue their own projects, aims and agendas. The insights are relevant for today’s challenges facing Muslim women in Europe. The text is illustrated with exceptional photographs.
By exploring the development of ethnic diversity and national tensions in Bulgaria and Bosnia, while also drawing parallels with Macedonia, this volume uses the three most diversely populated areas ...in the Balkans to tackle complex issues. What institutions of state building are capable of managing diverse ethno-religious traditions and conflicting national identities? How do people on the ground respond to state-sponsored political projects at the local community level? In what ways do studies of cultural representations of ethno-national and religious conflicts call attention to inequality and human rights violations? How have studies of human rights problems in the Balkans contributed to changes in international law? More generally, what is the role of the humanities and social sciences in developing a discourse on the subject of conflict resolution and human rights? The volume engages the question of ethno-national conflicts and identities from three perspectives: historical interpretations of national conflict and ethno-religious tensions in the context of empire- and state-building; cultural debates as reflected in the use of language and dance, film, and media production and circulation as tools for nation-and community-building; and thirdly, current political controversies over national resurgence and human rights both in the post-Yugoslav war context and in connection to European Union integration.
General George Joulwan played a role in many pivotal world
events during his long and exceptional career. Present at both the
rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, he served multiple tours in
Germany ...during the Cold War and two tours in Vietnam. By chance, he
was recruited as Nixon's White House deputy chief of staff and
witnessed the last acts of the Watergate drama first-hand. He went
on to lead US Southern Command -- fighting insurgencies and the
drug war in Latin America -- and was Supreme Allied Commander of
NATO forces in Europe (SACEUR) during the Rwandan genocide and the
Bosnian peacekeeping missions of the 1990s.
Joulwan chronicles his career in the upper echelons of the armed
forces. He shares his experiences working with major military and
political figures, including generals William E. DePuy, Alexander
Haig, John Vessey, and Colin Powell, US ambassador Richard
Holbrooke, and presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill
Clinton. Beyond the battlefield, Joulwan became an advocate for
military and civilian relations during the Vietnam War,
deescalating several high-intensity situations while studying at
Loyola University as part of the US Army's Option C program.
Watchman at the Gates merges memory and lessons in
leadership as Joulwan pays tribute to his teachers and colleagues
and explains the significance of their influence on his personal
approach to command. As a leader of combat troops in Vietnam, he
appealed to his subordinates on an individual basis, taking time to
build relationships that proved vital to the effectiveness of his
commands. He also reveals how similar relationships of mutual
understanding were crucial in his peaceful and productive dealings
with both allies and enemies.
At its heart, this inspiring memoir is a soldier's story --
written by a warrior who saw defending his country and the
democratic values it stands for as his highest calling. Featuring a
foreword by Tom Brokaw, Watchman at the Gates offers
incredible insights into world events as well as valuable lessons
for a new generation of leaders.
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.
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 a small, landlocked country, medieval Bosnia managed to
preserve its individuality, characterized by religious plurality and by the
persistence of its own ancient customs. But its central position ...in the region,
situated between east and west, and between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity,
meant it was heavily influenced, both politically and culturally by the
Venetian Republic, the Hungarian Kingdom, and the Byzantine Empire. Due to language
issues and scarcity of sources, this region has largely been overlooked by
western historiography. This volume features contributions from an exciting new
generation of medievalists, who are working to rectify this gap in the
narrative.<o:p>
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