'One Day I Will Tell This to My Daughter': Serb Women, Silence, and the Politics of Victimhood in Sarajevo (Golubovic 2019) (original) (raw)
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Different Categories of Victims and Competition for Victimhood in the Stories after the Bosnian War
Victims' protection: International law, national legislations and practice, The Fifth Annual Conference of the Victimology Society of Serbia, Victimology Society of Serbia, Beograd, Serbia (20141127-20141128). “Different Categories of Victims and Competition for Victimhood in the Stories after the Bosnian War” (”Različite kategorije žrtava i nadmetanje za dobijanje statusa žrtve u pričama preživjelih rata u Bosni i Hercegovini”), p. 15. My goal with this article is to analyse the retold experiences of 27 survivors of the 1990s war in north-western Bosnia. I focus on describing the informants' portrayal of “victimhood” as a social phenomenon as well as analysing those discursive patterns which contributed in constructing the category “victim” and ”perpetrator”. When, after the war, different actors claim this “victim” status, it sparks a competition for victimhood. All informants are eager to present themselves as victims while at the same time the other categories' victim status is downplayed. Different categories appear and they are: ”the remainders” those who lived in north-western Bosnia before, during and after the war; “the fugitives” those who driven into north-western Bosnia during the war; “the returnees” those who returned after the war and “the diaspora” those who were driven out from north-western Bosnia and remained in their new country. The competition between these categories seems to take place on a symbolic level. All interviewees want to portray themselves as ”ideal victims” but they are all about to lose that status. The returnees and the diaspora are losing status by receiving recognition from the surrounding community and because they have a higher economic status, the remainders are losing status since they are constantly being haunted by war events and the refugees are losing status by being presented as strangers and thus fitting the role of ideal perpetrators. In this reproduction of competition for the victim role, all demarcations that were played out so successfully during the war live on.
Constructing “Ideal Victim” Stories of Bosnian War Survivors
Social Inclusion, 2015
Basic, Goran (2015) ”Constructing 'Ideal Victim' Stories of Bosnian War Survivors”. Social Inclusion, 3(4): 25-37. Previous research on victimhood during and after the Bosnian war has emphasized the importance of narratives but has not focused on narratives about victimhood or analyzed post-war interviews as a competition for victimhood. This article tries to fill this gap using stories told by survivors of the Bosnian war during the 1990s. In this analysis of the retold experiences of 27 survivors of the war in northwestern Bosnia, the aim is to describe the informants’ portrayal of “victimhood” as a social phenomenon as well as analyzing the discursive patterns that contribute to constructing the category “victim”. When, after the war, different categories claim a “victim” status, it sparks a competition for victimhood. All informants are eager to present themselves as victims while at the same time the other categories’ victim status are downplayed. In this reproduction of competition for the victim role, all demarcations that were played out so successfully during the war live on.
2014
F Fi if ft th h A An nn nu ua al l C Co on nf fe er re en nc ce e o of f t th he e V Vi ic ct ti im mo ol lo og gy y S So oc ci ie et ty y o of f S Se er rb bi ia a V Vi ic ct ti im ms s' ' p pr ro ot te ec ct ti io on n: : I In nt te er rn na at ti io on na al l l la aw w, , n na at ti io on na al l l le eg gi is sl la at ti io on ns s a an nd d p pr ra ac ct ti ic ce e B Bo oo ok k o of f a ab bs st tr ra ac ct ts s B Be el lg gr ra ad de e, , 2 27 7 t th h a an nd d 2 28 8 t th h N No ov ve em mb be er r 2 20 01 14 4 14.00-15.00 Lunch break 15.00-16.30 Thematic sessions Thematic session 1: Gender-based violence and femicide Working language of the session: English
War Violence, Victimhood and Reconciliation: in Stories of Bosnian War Survivors
‘I too, remember dust’: Peace-building, Politics & the Arts’, The University of Winchester, Winchester, England (20150907-20150908). ”War Violence, Victimhood and Reconciliation: in Stories of Bosnian War Survivors”, pp. 1-15. In this analysis of the retold experiences of 27 survivors of the war in northwestern Bosnia, the aim is to describe the informants’ portrayal of “war violence”, “victimhood”, and “reconciliation” as a social phenomenon as well as analyzing the discursive patterns that contribute to constructing the category “victim” and “perpetrator”. The violence practice during the war is portrayed as organized and ritualized and this creates a picture that the violence practice became a norm in the society, rather than the exception. When, after the war, different categories claim a “victim” status, it sparks a competition for victimhood. All informants are eager to present themselves as victims while at the same time the other categories’ victim status are downplayed. The stories of reconciliation are connected to the past; the interactive consequences of war-time violence are intimately linked to the narrator’s war experiences. The interviewees distance themselves from some individuals or described situations. It is common that the portrayal of possible reconciliation is transformed into a depicted implacable attitude, thus the interviewees negotiate their stances: they articulate between reconciliation and implacability statements.
'To Me, You Are Not a Serb': Ethnicity, Ambiguity, and Anxiety in Post-War Sarajevo (Golubovic 2020)
Ethnicities, 2020
The siege of Sarajevo has altered the experience of ethnicity, reconfiguring ethnic categories into moral boundaries. From 1992 to 1995, the city was held under siege by the Army of Republika Srpska, and many Sarajevan Serbs still grapple today with the feeling that others view them as aggressors. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Serb women of the pre-war generations, I describe how they intentionally make small alterations in gesture and body language in order to perform ethnic ambiguity, and avoid being read by others as Serb. While anthropological accounts have tended to use performativity to emphasize the constructed and situational nature of ethnicity, here I focus on the anxiety that drives Serb women’s performances in order to capture the inherent and inescapable feeling of ethnicity in a post-war space. I also discuss the difficulty of capturing this anxiety through empirical methods, navigating the discrepancy between Serb women’s narrative accounts of ethnic stigmatization compared to the apparently unproblematic flow of everyday social life. Through this discrepancy, I demonstrate how the embodied and ever-accumulating feeling of ethnic anxiety can conjure threats where there may be none, and how it can charge even the most (seemingly) mundane encounters. Link: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468796819873141
Victimhood, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: in Stories of Bosnian War Survivors
2015
In this analysis of the retold experiences of 27 survivors of the war in northwestern Bosnia, the aim is to describe the informants’ portrayal of “victimhood”, “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” as a social phenomenon as well as analyzing the discursive patterns that contribute to constructing the category “victim” and “perpetrator”. When, after the war, different categories claim a “victim” status, it sparks a competition for victimhood. All informants are eager to present themselves as victims while at the same time the other categories’ victim status are downplayed. In this reproduction of competition for the victim role, all demarcations that were played out so successfully during the war live on. The stories of forgiveness and reconciliation are connected to the past; the interactive consequences of war-time violence are intimately linked to the narrator’s war experiences. The interviewees distance themselves from some individuals or described situations. It is common that the ...
Telling Truths, Keeping Silence in the Aftermath of War in Sarajevo
Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives, 2024
Efforts for justice in the aftermath of devastating violence are often thought to require particular types of communicative work: we think of “truth and reconciliation,” of dialogue, confessions, and people speaking out about what happened. In this chapter, in contrast, I highlight communicative practices in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina that prioritize containment, avoidance, and even obfuscation. Such practices stand out in my ethnographic work with members of mixed-ethnicity families in Sarajevo. As they maintain relationships across lines of ethno-religious difference, Sarajevans carefully manage what they reveal about themselves. These ethnographically-salient silences raise questions about social justice in a deeply divided society, troubling the Euro-American faith in language as a transparent tool for accomplishing transformation. What if the things that are most meaningful and most crucial to life together cannot be recouped (trust, for example), but have to be rebuilt through living out relationships over time? And what if ambiguity and silence are not ways of avoiding relationship, but ways of preserving space for it to exist?
2020
In this article, we draw on feminist trauma studies with the aim of deconstructing the theoretical and methodological binary between individual and collective trauma. Based on first-hand interviews with Bosnian survivors of rape, we attempt to ‘think against’ the private/public split that trauma studies work often unintentionally reifies. We draw upon recent methodological innovations that have been influenced by thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Specifically, we work with what Jackson and Mazzei call rhizomatic and trace readings in the threshold. Through a rhizomatic and trace reading of narrative pieces extracted from the interviews, we engage with the following questions: 1) How do we theorise what Davoine and Gaudilliere call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines’ between collective/public accounts of trauma and those traditionally constructed as private/personal? 2) How do accounts of war rape, which narrate the eruption of the past into the present, elucidate the myriad links be...